


A Decade under the Influence

by Arnica



Series: Blocking your own shot [6]
Category: Torchwood
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-13
Updated: 2013-01-06
Packaged: 2017-11-14 04:20:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 49,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/511247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arnica/pseuds/Arnica
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Owen and Cheyenne have much more in common than the medic is comfortable talking about, but their shared skill sets make them the perfect undercover team to catch a weapons smuggler that Torchwood's been chasing for fifty years. A BYOS verse orignal story</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

“Cheyenne?” Ianto raps his knuckles against the leaded glass set into the door to her office. She holds one finger over her head without turning away from the monitor on her computer, chair pivoting back and forth in a way that he's starting to recognize as her 'go for the kill' wiggle.

“Of course. I fully understand. Have your secretary shoot everything over to Sam and we'll be glad to get that information to you by close of day Eastern Standard. We look forward to doing business with you.” Her laugh is throaty, hinting on the verge of flirty even as she twists back and forth in her chair, making apologetic glances in Ianto's direction as he fishes out his pocket watch, clicking it open and dangling it at her. “Of course, I'll have Sam add you to the guest list. You too.” The phone slides across the desk with how hard she jabs the button to disconnect the call, snatching files off the corner of her desk and coming across the narrow arm of the massive hand carved cherry antique she had picked out of the storage areas. “Sorry!”

“Make a couple fresh millions while the rest of us were playing around with alien tech?” She smirks and their footsteps ring in sync on the metal stairs as they jog down in tandem from the second floor of the archives, taking the shortcut through 'J-L 1938-1962' towards the back stairs for the main floor.

“We won't run out of ramen and toilet paper any time soon. It'll even cover the electric bill from Christmas that sent you into arrhythmia.” They come out of the cramped stairwell into a service corridor that twists around behind half of the Hub's work floor before dumping them out next to the autopsy bay which is ominously silent. “ _Fuck_ , even Owen beat us.”

“Well, someone was busy building empires when we should have been there already...”

“I've been here since the end of September, I could have found my way to the conference room without an escort thank you very much.”

“And it would have taken you _twice_ as long because you wouldn't have taken the service hall...”

“It's creepy!”

“Hi, could I interrupt your far more interesting argument with my pesky little briefing? I won't take long.” Jack's voice startles them both into looking up. They've bickered themselves all the way up the stairs and through the open doors. Ianto lets himself slink over to his seat, even as Cheyenne flops into her chair with a rueful grin, wrinkling her nose at Jack.

“Mea Culpa. Hey Owen, Sterling Surgical just acquired HMN's eastern European distributors. Paperwork's being faxed as we speak, expect a press conference in a couple days followed by a two to five point drop in stocks.” Owen grins, doing the same little fingers only victory dance he does every time Cheyenne brings up her family's company getting one over on whoever HMN is. Jack's expression twists into something sympathetic and Ianto jots the initials down on the corner of a sticky note to remind himself to google the stock key later.

“Okay, attention to the front please.” Jack raps his knuckles on the table and Ianto forces his attention from the three letters under his hand to the front of the room and the man shuffling papers at the head of the table. Everyone else has coffee in front of them from Ianto's setup before he ventured down into the archives to locate their missing member and Cheyenne looks longingly at the mugs before sighing and pouring a plastic cup of water from the carafe in the center of the table. “Torchwood, meet Leviski.” Jack dims the lights in the room with his wrist strap and pictures begin flashing in rapid sequence across the wall monitors. All of them are small Caucasian men, but other than that the seventeen total pictures flickering across the screen have nothing in common. “Leviski is a smuggler with a fondness for using Earth as a drop point; the _perfect_ drop point since legally, no one outside of the Time Agency is supposed to do any policing on pre-colonization Earth and now they're gone. He's had his genetic code destabilized to the point where he can shift his features, changing his face subtly and constantly so that he can't be traced by cameras, but there's only so far he can change. The target will always be One hundred and seventy centimeters, and ten and a half stone. We've been taking runs at him for almost fifty years now, mostly just scaring off his buyers when we could but this time we're going to get this punk.”

“So you've been chasing the same smuggler off Earth for fifty years, and he keeps coming back and telling you to fuck yourself, is that what you're saying?” Owen has his feet up on the table again, smirking at Jack.

“Yes, Owen. I have headed up the Leviski task force, of which I was typically _half_ , for fifty years, but _this_ year, his ass is mine because _this year_ I got a tip from one of my informants that he's got a deal set to go down sometime next week somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic between here and Morocco.”

“Oh, well with solid intel like 'sometime next week' and 'somewhere in the ocean' how can we miss him?” Owen's being a prick, but it's hard to argue when the six of them can hardly monitor the entire Atlantic ocean twenty-four hours a day for a week, much less get to some random spot in time to break up whatever is happening. “What's he doing, selling off national monuments, because if he is I have a bridge for him...” Gwen has her hand in front of her mouth, trying to look like she's not holding back a laugh and normally Cheyenne would be egging Owen on since for some sad reason she thinks he's hilarious, but she's got her brow furrowed, fingers flying over her tablet.

“No, Owen. If he was stealing the pyramids the administration would have been more interested in apprehending him. Leviski is an arms dealer and a good ten percent of his weaponry ends up _back_ on Earth, only two percent of that ending up confiscated in the right hands.”

“He's going to be on the Silver Cloud, isn't he Jack?” Owen doesn't look bored or amused anymore, leaning forward as intently as Cheyenne until the immortal man looming over the table cocks his head to the side in curiosity.

“That's what I've been told. What do you know about it?”

“That's a yearly private pleasure cruise for the old money.” The medic is drumming his pen against the arm of his chair, eyes focused somewhere over Jack's shoulder on the screen as he cuts in. “Pedigree's of less than three generations need not apply for boarding passes.”

“It's _the_ social event of the year for those of us who like to mix business with pleasure without tripping over drunken, rowdy, trashy brats and paparazzi. Also, Owen isn't kidding about that pedigree thing. People have sent their VP's and PA's in their place as a bonus or reward, but they never do it twice. Certain people.” She and Owen share a look that baffles Ianto. “Make sure it's politely obvious how much they aren't wanted mingling with the 'better half' of the boat. So if you've planning on crashing the party sweetheart, you're going to have to strike that thought.”

“I'd love to see them keep me off.”

“Oh, you'll see it. The Silver Cloud is a private boat and neither the boat's home port or the owner are tied to the UK. You don't have the leverage to bully your way on. That said, give me five minutes.” She holds up that same imperious single finger in response to Jack's open mouth as she slides her phone out of the breast pocket of her jacket and flicks the bluetooth option over to pick up her headset. “Daddy, can I have your tickets for the Silver Cloud cruise this year?”

**

Of course there's a catch because they're Torchwood and if it were ever easy for them to do their bloody job the world would stop.

“It's not negotiable Jack. I have the tickets, but the condition is that I go and actually finish off the business that my father is supposed to be doing himself. We're in the middle of a _very_ delicate merger and I will sit dead and in _Hell_ before fucking Myrna gets her evil demon claws in and fucks up an account _I_ have been setting up for months. I'm on for this one, you just need to tell me what we're doing and pick someone else to go with unless you're coming?”

“You...” Jack has his hands dug deeply into his hair as he rakes it back from his face. “What were you planning on doing with Indiana?”

“His father is _right there_ and he's in daycare all fucking day anyway, but I can have a twenty-four hour nanny background checked and ready in two days if you really think I need to, Jack.” It's never a good thing when she says his name that way, low and bitten off sharply at the 'k'.

“He doesn't need a nanny, I can have Rhiannon pick him up from nursery for a couple of days.” It's not the answer Jack's hoping for from the expression on his face.

“Jack, some space smuggler is not getting between me and an eighty-seven _million_ dollar acquisition. It's not happening, so you can sign me on and do this the easy way, or we can start working on plan b, whatever that may be.”

She's got him and everyone in the room knows it. Jack looks down at his short stack of notes and back up at Cheyenne, still sprawled in her chair and completely unfazed by the looming figure pacing the front of the table.

“Fine. You're on the assignment, this _one_ time but you're now off archival duties and on a weeklong crash course in field assignments. We're finishing up this briefing and heading right downstairs to the firing range and the gym.”

The rest of the briefing is short and not nearly as entertaining as watching Jack and Cheyenne. It's actually reading like a pretty standard identify and apprehend, not much different than any standard alien hunt other than taking place in the middle of the ocean with no backup available if things go wrong. Cheyenne is busy typing as fast as she can, taking notes on what seems like everything Jack says, which is good because Ianto can't stop obsessively listing every famous cruise ship sinking in his head. The lights catch him by surprise when they come back on and he yanks his eyes away from the morbid stick drawing he's been doodling of a cartoon flying saucer sinking a cereal bowl with smokestacks and racing stripes as a stick person dangles in the air between the two of ships.

“That is the crappiest boat I have ever seen anyone draw. Also, her head is entirely too big and she has no tits.” Ianto doesn't bother looking up, just shooting his fist out to the left where Owen's voice is coming from and grinning when it connects.

“Owen, do me a solid.” They're the only ones in the conference room, Jack and the girls already on the main floor heading further down into the Hub.

“Says the bastard who just punched me in my bloody hip.” He doesn't know what his face looks like as he closes out of the macabre doodle, but the medic falls in next to him as Ianto gathers up the mess around the table.

“Volunteer to go on the boat.” Ianto's expecting some kind of wise crack about how watching his hot girlfriend for a week on a luxury cruise is hardly a favor. Maybe some kind of crack about showing Cheyenne a great time at sea. Instead there's silence and a remarkably grim expression on the smaller man's face when Ianto looks over.

“That's...I'm sure Jack already has me in mind.” He turns on his heel, disappearing through the door. As if he wasn't already weird enough on the best of days.

**

They're in the gym by the time Ianto makes it down, squeezing in next to Tosh along the far wall to sit on the much shorter stack of padded mats. The room looks hilariously similar to a high school gymnasium with wood floors that Ianto re-waxes every six months, climbing ropes dangling from the far off rafters, and a selection of free weights, weighted vests, and a startling array of blunted weapons arranged on racks against the opposite wall. Owen's sitting on the tool chest sized medical box next to the mats, swinging his feet as they watch Cheyenne, Gwen, and Jack come out of the changing rooms in bare feet, loose trousers, and vests. Gwen has her hair plaited back from her face into a stubby braid that just barely rests between her shoulder blades, but Cheyenne has twisted hers back from her face and left the rest down in a fall.

“Okay, we're going to start with hand to hand, one on one this go around. I want you to come at me as hard and fast as you can. We'll see how long you stay on your feet and work from there.” She's bouncing from foot to foot, circling Jack as she shakes her hands loosely at the wrist. Ianto notices she's the only one who's bothered to tape her knuckles. Toshiko must notice too, because she leans over, tapping the back of Ianto's hand with her fingers and the folded edge of a bill caught between the first two.

“I've got twenty on Chy against Jack for five minutes or less, and ten on Gwen against Cheyenne for ten minutes or more; tell Owen.”

“I heard you.” The medic is keeping his voice down. “Thirty on Jack sending her flying by accident inside of ten minutes, ten for a tie on the chick fight.”

“You want me to come at you seriously? Like actually try to hurt you, or just go for the tap?”

“Try to hurt...”

It's as far as he gets. Cheyenne is quick, taking a running start and before anyone can warn Jack that she's coming at him from behind before he's given the signal, she's brought the top of her foot up between his legs. Owen's making loud sympathetic noises that almost drowned out Jack's bellow as she throws herself on his crumpled form, bringing both elbows down as hard as she can on between his shoulder blades and riding him to the ground, rabbit punching him in the back and side of the head until Jack reaches out his arm, slamming his hand down hard three times against the mat. She's off his back before Owen can stop groaning through his laughter, stroking her hands franticly over Jack's skull.

“Are you okay? You were wearing a cup right?”

“Maybe you should have asked that before you kicked him in the useful bits!” Owen slides off the chest with a thump, leaving a neatly folded twenty pound note behind that Ianto passes to a smug Tosh. Jack waves off the ice pack Gwen's brandishing at him anxiously, moving carefully as he rolls over to grin up at the woman hovering over him.

“Thankfully. You always fight like that?” His voice is tight with discomfort and he winces as Owen unceremoniously yanks the ice pack from Gwen and smacks it against the back of Jack's head, holding it there despite the immortal man’s squirming.

“I'm _small_ , so yes, I fight quick and dirty. Get in, fuck 'em up, get out fast.”

“Good girl. You and Gwen take a spin on the floor.” Jack makes a quickly aborted attempt to stand, sinking back to the floor with a grimace. “Owen, little help?” Owen almost comes off his own feet trying to yank Jack onto his, but he's snickering as he helps the larger man hobble over to the mats and drops him roughly between Ianto and Tosh. “Pardon me.” A pink flush crawls up Toshiko's face as Jack sprawls his knees as wide as he can, yanking the ice pack off the back of his head and dropping it in his lap. “So, which of you mutinous traitors was it betting against me?”

“Me.” Tosh lifts one hand, smiling cheerfully even as she avoids looking over at their boss with ice in his lap.

“You know the rules. Bet against Jack...”

“Jack gets half. I'll get it to you later.” She swats away the hand extended imperiously into her eyeline. “Get your hand out of the way, I've got a tenner on Gwen after the ten minute mark, Owen's got the same on a tie.” Jack starts to reach for his pockets before remembering that his wallet is in his street clothes in the locker room.

“Throw me in for ten for Chy, same time frame. Ladies!” He raises his voice. “Any time now.”

When Ianto started working at Three, Jack did all the hand to hand training with Suzie. Gwen is a much better choice. Hand to hand her police training shines; her movements efficient and smooth as she circles Cheyenne, feinting towards her in different directions to work out where her weak side is before going in with a hard punch to the side of the head. Cheyenne goes to the ground hard, rolling away from the three short legged kicks aimed for where her midsection would have been, up into a crouch and it occurs to Ianto too late that he doesn't actually want to be down in the gym watching people try their best to stomp the shit out of his girlfriend. Owen hops back onto the red chest as Gwen goes for another kick and Cheyenne rushes into the movement, crashing into the leg before it can gain much momentum and taking them both to the mats in a rolling snarling pile.

“Stop looking like you're gonna cry you big baby and enjoy the sexiness of it all.” There's a flurry of hair and screeching as Gwen flips Cheyenne onto her back and goes over with her as the older woman snarls her fingers into the stubby brown braid and uses it as a handle. “Look, there's hair pulling and everything.”

“You are such a misogynist Owen.” There's fond amusement in Tosh's voice as she punches Jack in the shoulder. “Pass that down.” Jack's knuckles barely rap Ianto's bicep and he in turn puts as much force as possible into the blow to the meat of Owen's thigh, snickering as he curls around it with a curse.

“Ow, you bastards! I might have to run for my life on this fucking dead leg! Hypocrites, all three of you, particularly you Tosh!”

“I have no idea what you're talking about.” Someone squeals with indignation and the sound of fabric ripping yanks all attention back fully to where Gwen and Cheyenne are circling each other from a safe distance again. Gwen's hair has been pulled half out of it's braid, falling into her eyes as she spits blood out of her mouth onto the floor and Ianto is _not_ cleaning that goddamnit. Cheyenne is watching her warily, the right shoulder strap of her shirt ripped at the seam and four long nail marks puffed up red on her shoulder. “Should we separate them?”

“Nope.” Jack's obviously done healing whatever minor damage was transmitted through the cup, ice pack abandoned on the floor as he leans forward, eyes sharp and much less distracted then he'd have the rest of them think. “They go until we've got a winner and I know how she's going to react to fighting someone her own size.”

Jack ends up breaking them up anyway eight minutes and fifty-two seconds in, according to Ianto's pocket watch. Gwen has Cheyenne in a full body lock hold, legs wrapped around her waist and the crook of her elbow wrapped across the slim line of Chy's throat. Cheyenne though, has one arm twisted up next to her own throat, keeping the choke hold too lose to be effective and is rolling across the floor with Gwen still wrapped around her, screeching like a panther and trying to head butt backwards.

“Stop! Stop, you're done! It's official.” He crossed the floor quickly, leaning down and tapping them both on the shoulders in case they didn't hear him. “From now on, we're shutting down shop hunting aliens and joining the foxy boxing circuit!” Gwen flops over off of the smaller woman, panting heavily as she lifts her hand just enough to make sure everyone in the room can see the rude gesture she's making. Cheyenne's not any better, staying sprawled where she landed, hair snarled and tangled in her face, billowing with the force of her breathing. “Impressive, both of you.”

“Fucking should be.” Chy flops onto her back with one enormous heave, knocking her outstretched hand against Gwen's hip. “You're a fucking _beast_ Gwen Cooper. Look what you did to my shirt!” The entire neckline has been torn free, most likely during minute four when Gwen tried to toss Cheyenne with a hip throw and she threw herself backwards to the floor and planted her feet firmly in Gwen's guts, tumbling her instead. The vest is a total loss, one shoulder and the entire neck gone, a rip between the ribbing that goes halfway to her navel so half of her hot pink sports bra is exposed.

“Says the woman who bit my hip.”

“Got your legs away from my neck.”

“Wait, there was _hip biting_ that we couldn't see?” Owen slides off, trainers scuffing up the wood as he flops onto the mat between them. “I demand a rematch. With baby oil, just as soon as I take a look at the damage you ladies have done.” He's got the mini bag from the top drawer in his hand, just bactine and bandages mostly, but the break's as good an excuse as any for Ianto to slip upstairs for snacks in case they start again.

**

They don't go back to unarmed combat, or if Jack does run her through another scenario, it's over quickly enough that by the time Ianto calls down to find out where to bring the coffee and cakes he's told to head right to the gun range.

The tight gnawing feeling in his guts, the one that kept him from enjoying watching Gwen and Cheyenne rolling across the floor tangled around each other, is gone by the time he comes into the room to the sight of Chy stripping guns down at speed and reassembling them almost as fast. Her fingers are sure and rapid with a Colt in her hands, slower but still steady with others. Normally, this is the part where Jack likes to mix business with pleasure, flirting and distracting in equal measure to test their nerves but with Chy he just steps back, taking his coffee from Ianto's tray and handing him a pair of ear protectors. The world goes thoroughly silent, only the echo of his rushing blood until he reaches up, turning on the radio and sounds comes rushing back in, filtered through electronics and static.

“All right. The range is hot ladies and gentlemen and the rounds are live. You're clear to shoot Dr. Morgan. Go until you miss a target completely.” There are seats behind the blast shield sectioning off the left hand side of the room and Ianto settles into one, stealing one of the Black and White's off the tray out from under Jack's fingers as the lights in the range go red and she starts firing at paper targets.

“Jack, why are you doing this? Doesn't Cheyenne have some kind of trophy downstairs in her office from the NRA?” Gwen's voice is flattened by the radio and thick with a fat lip and cookie in her mouth.

"She does, but she has to get vetted properly so if there's ever an incident she's covered under the Torchwood mandates and protections. That means getting cleared as a marksman by Owen and myself.”

She does get cleared, but only after Jack runs her through targets with handguns, shotguns, and rifles while standing, crouching and shooting from her belly. Tosh and Gwen are watching it curiously, but the drill is familiar to Ianto; Owen as well from the way his eyes skips ahead to what's next every time she finishes a shot. He's pretty sure Gwen preemptively flunked out of the sniper test before she even got through the standard shooting exercises because on a good day she still has to stop running to fire, but Ianto finds it curious that Tosh doesn't seem familiar with the timed tests for setting up a scope, adjusting for wind from the fan set into the far wall, and firing down the length of the entire range, not just the hundred meter max for paper targets. The fan comes on with a roar and Cheyenne sets the scope, but Ianto can see before she pulls the trigger that her shot is going to go high.

“Fuck!” She curses sharply over the line, snatching the rifle off the stand and unloading it on her way to hit the panel on the wall that changes the light from red-live ammo to blue-all clear. She already has her headset off by the time they make it out onto the range, face drawn down into a frown. “I'm fucking awful at the wind shear part.”

“Well, you qualify. You can carry anything in the Torchwood arsenal as far as ballistics weapons. Special tech can wait until tomorrow.” Jack presses her against him, one arm looped around her shoulders as he squeezes. “Good job kiddo. Hit the showers and you can head out to get Indy.”

**

It hasn't stopped being weird yet, making the drive out to Lisvane every day instead of to his flat. Jack's sprawled out in the passenger seat, knees wide as he sits silently, head tipped back against the headrest and eyes shut. Chy left her flash drive plugged into the radio the last time she borrowed his car and Ianto keeps meaning to bring it in the house, but it always slips his mind somewhere between turning on the radio and getting out of the car until the next time he turns the engine over and hears something unexpected.

“Do you know if we're out of milk? I'm suddenly convinced, now that we've passed the last store, that we're all out.” Jack, helpful as always, gives a half shrug with one shoulder, silently mouthing the lyrics to something old and unfamiliar along with the radio. “Thanks. If we're out, I'm sending you back out for it.”

“No.” Ianto's surprised he's gotten that much out of him. For someone who has to fill every room he enters, something about the ride home makes Jack into someone still and quiet; eyes shut as he sings almost silently along with whatever is on the radio from the moment they pull out of the car park until Ianto turns the car off in the driveway.

“You're a rotten thing Jack Harkness. If we're out of milk I'll go get it, again.”

Cheyenne parks like an asshole, tending to leave her little Honda truck slightly crooked in front of the door instead of pulling it around the extra ten meters to park in front of the garage, since no one can park _in_ it during the winters when she and Jack have their cars tarped and put away from the snow and road salt. Ianto rolls his eyes and whips his Nissan around it, parking in his normal spot _not_ blocking the driveway. 

Jack already has the front door open, kicking his boots under the bench in the entryway. There's music coming from the back half of the house, since Cheyenne seems to be allergic to silence, and a lack of dinner smells that reminds Ianto it's his turn to cook tonight. Jack wanders off towards the rear of the house to finish indulging in his new post work ritual of silent car ride followed by hurling himself on the sectional with his feet up and Indiana sprawled across his chest and Ianto heads upstairs to change.

He's still getting used to the fact that this is his bedroom now. It's approximately the size of the living room that made up roughly 1/3 of his old flat, and he had spent the entire time they were moving everything in thinking it was ridiculously large until he realized how much space three adults in one bedroom takes. Some mornings he's not sure it's big enough. He flops down in the overstuffed black armchair under the bay window, peeling off his shoes and socks and wiggling his toes in the thick carpet. The muscles in his neck and shoulders are tight, too much time spent flinching today every time Chy took a hit and he rolls them, trying to stretch the tenderness out as he starts unbuttoning on his way to the closet.

He will never, ever, admit it out loud because somehow, somewhere Owen would hear him, but Ianto is in love with this closet. It's everything the telly told him rich people's closets were like, as big as his old bedroom with walls painted in a black on pale grey design that makes the bright white cabinets look whiter. The island in the center has drawers on three sides and a vanity on the fourth with a double sided mirror in case the three floor to ceiling ones on each wall aren't enough. The recessed lighting is adjustable, but Ianto likes to indulge in the guilty pleasure of only turning on the chandelier when it's just him and watching the reflection of the lights through the crystal on it in the mirror while he changes into old cheap sweatpants and a threadbare Incubus tour shirt that he's still not sure how he ended up owning.

Cheyenne is at the extra long table in the family room that they mostly share for work, despite the fact that she _and_ Jack both have private offices on the third floor. Ianto has his ugly chair and his old couch set up in the loft down the hall in front of the massive television he got for Christmas and a pool table in the back corner next to the bar because he doesn't need an office at home, but he does love the game room. She's got her hair twisted up off her face in the kind of bizarre anime styled knotted pigtails she only bothers with when she doesn't have the patience to keep brushing anything back over her shoulders or out of her face.

“Taking over the world again?” She tilts her face upwards, letting him press a kiss to her forehead before leaning back over her laptop and the reams of paperwork spread out around it.

“You know Jack frowns on global domination. No, this _mess_.” She gestures accusingly at the piles of print outs. “Is my schedule for the next three months. I'm trying to see how many of these video conferences and lunch meetings can be condensed or finalized while I'm at sea. I had Sam email it to me and this fucking stack is what I ended up with once I added in my personal and Torchwood schedules. This is crazy Ianto, there's no way I do all this stuff. My calendar is a lying liar who lies.”

“You _are_ ridiculously busy Dr. Morgan. Makes me glad I'm not you.” He kisses the crown of her head because he likes that annoyed little growl she makes. “Lasagna or steak and chips?”

“Steak and chips!” Jack's quick to answer, lifting Indiana above his head as if his vote wouldn't be counted without hoisting the baby.

“You two have whatever, I'm on salads and water for the next week.” Ianto stops in the middle of turning, cocking his head to the side.

“I'm sorry, I hallucinated. I thought you said you're only eating...what does she call it Jack?”

“The food her food eats.” Jack's upright now, leaning over the back of the couch to share a confused look with Ianto. Indy is wobbling next to him, clinging to the back of the couch while Jack's hand flat against his back keeps him from toppling backwards as he bounces excitedly at getting to stand on the couch and stare at mummy with the big boys.

“Ha fucking ha. I've got ten pounds from Indy that didn't come off, that need to go before I step foot on that ship because if Myrna Harper says one _fucking_ word about me looking 'hefty' I'll kill her, I swear to god I will. I will kill her, dump her over the edge onto the fucking _props_ and let Owen visit me in jail every Mother’s Day and throw me a fucking party.”

“Wha...why would Owen throw you a party on Mother's Day for hypothetically killing...”

“Oops.” Cheyenne spins her chair back to the table, but not quickly enough to keep Ianto from seeing the flush creeping up her neck. Jack snorts, disappearing back behind the couch taking Indiana with him and obviously he's the only one in the room who doesn't know what she's talking about, although he's starting to get a pretty good idea. “Shut _up_ Jack, I just thought it was one of those 'we don't talk about it' things!”

“ _What_ don't we talk about?” He taps his bare toes on the floor, feeling more and more annoyed the longer no one says anything.

“Owen's disinheritance? That company I'm always bending over backwards to screw anytime I get the chance? It's Harper Multi-nationals.” She sighs and he must look exactly as uninterested in monster corporations as he actually is. “Parent company of H&M pharmaceuticals? The people who make the band-aids, and peroxide, and pretty much everything else in the medicine cabinet? That's all supposed to be Owen's.”

Ianto thinks he can hear something in his brain actually shatter.

“Owen? _Our_ Owen, the one who acts like he was raised by a dysfunctional pack of promiscuous wolves? He's loaded? And he works for _Torchwood_?”

I'm loaded and _I_ work for Torchwood. Besides, he's not. Not anymore. Myrna, who is a man eating she-beast by the way, disowned him when he was like, sixteen for getting a full ride to college _and_ med school through King David's. It was all anyone talked about for like, two years. The woman has all the maternal warmth of something that typically eats its young but has a stomachache so can't.”

“Stop, I feel like you lost me ten minutes ago. So Owen's mam is Myrna, the one who you cannot stand, who's name you all but _spit_ on every time every time it's mentioned?”

“Yes, may she burn in Hell.”

“And you hate this woman this much...over business?” Chy snorts, cradling her head in her palms as she looks at him.

“Of course not. I hate Myrna because there aren't a lot of women who do what we do and she'd desperately like for there to be one less. She _used_ to do what I do for my family now, the wooing of clients, charity events, and such, but she's run her husband's company completely since Owen's dad had his stroke...nine, ten years ago?” Her voice trails off in confusion and Ianto isn't sure how he feels about this strange and probably intrusive glimpse into what makes Owen the way he is. “I think it was...it was _eleven_ years ago, because I was nineteen and it was the same year she sent me to the fucking emergency room. Somehow she found out I had a nori allergy and _didn't_ bother finding out how severe. Her cook put it in five fucking courses and we were never able to prove she did it on purpose. There were epi pens and stomach pumps involved, the cunt.” Ianto freezes in the act of shaking his head to make sure he heard her previous complaint right. He's not sure what's got his head spinning more, the fact that she's accusing Owen's apparently evil villain of a mother of trying to _murder_ her more than a decade ago, or the sheer vitriol his normally pleasant girlfriend is dripping. “My father expanded from just surgical and heavy medical equipment into the pharmaceutical business _specifically_ with the intention of making her regret it.”

“I never heard that part of the story.” Jack's sitting back upright and he's got his hands all but wrapped around Indy's head, shielding his tiny ears from his mother's foul mouth. Indiana fusses, trying to squirm out of the grip blanketing his skull.

“Where would you? Well brought up people don't bandy failed _poisonings_ about in mixed company. She can't _stand_ me because I'm better than her. I'm younger, better educated, better _looking_ , and so superior at parenting that if there's any justice in the universe she'll spontaneously burst into flame when she sees me again. Particularly if I'm in a bikini and she and her surgically diminished but still visible wattles aren't, so salads only for me this week.”

“Wow.” Ianto cannot deal with this standing barefooted and hungry, so he yanks one of the chairs away from the table, flopping into it roughly enough that it spins a quarter way around. “Let me recap to make sure I have this correct. Owen's mother owns your family's biggest competitor. She tried to _kill you_ and now the two of you have an epic hate on that's more than a decade old?”

“No, she didn't try to _kill_ me, she tried to make me _sick_ at a charity function she was hosting where I was going to close my very first deal. The fact that I got sick enough to end up in the A &E was purely because she was incompetent and sloppy.”

“Okay, I can't take this. It's entirely too daytime telly for me. You're insane, baby.” He tugs the end of her pigtail as he pushes back to his feet. “You and all your ilk. Is that why Owen's pessimistically convinced that he's the one going with you?”

“He _is_ the one going with her.” Jack settles Indiana on the floor, flinching as the infant sets off at a speedy crawl directly for the baby gate and the two dogs sitting directly on the other side, curly tails thumping as they see him coming. “Owen's a better shot than Gwen, he's got more field experience, and I need someone with rank enough to throw their weight around if it's needed. You can't both leave Indy, Tosh can't go, the mark knows me by sight...has to be Owen.”

“Why can't Tosh...”

“Besides,” Jack's talking over him and Ianto lets it slide because he doesn't think he can take another shock on the level of 'Owen is a disinherited pill prince and son of Satan' tonight. “I hate using the two of you as a smoke screen, but between his reentry into your particular social circle and the drama it will bring, no one will look any further at your both being there.”

“They'll all just assume it's the two of us trying to drive the woman to an early grave, fingers crossed for that.”

**

The next three days are a miserable hell.

Cheyenne on a diet is a mean vicious creature prone to snapping, sulking, and stealing snacks from people's desks only to stare balefully at them and throw them away still in the wrappers. She drinks more water in a day than Ianto thinks is probably healthy and then complains about spending the entire day running in and out of the loo, treats her salads to looks that would make lesser lettuces wilt every time he brings them back with the food _at her request_ , and she's currently livid with him for saying (and you think he'd know better than to say anything other than 'you're so beautiful' to a woman on a diet) that if she's put on any weight since he met her more than a year ago he can't tell and it's obviously where he likes it.

If there's any humor anywhere in the situation, it's that Owen seems to be doing the exact same thing.

“They're sick in the head, both of them.” Ianto glances up from his bitching to peek at the cctv monitors, checking to make sure Cheyenne is still in the gym running suicides with Owen and curses himself as he catches himself doing it.

“You obviously don't watch enough reality television.” Jack and Tosh are gone, off across town getting readings from some odd electrical impulses, leaving Gwen and himself to keep watch over a slow day at the rift and spin in their chairs. “ _I_ however watch nothing but trashy telly and the news. I must have seen dozens of celebrities, and heiresses', and royals do the same thing. It's funnier on the tv when it's not _your_ snacks being stolen. She keeps going in my bloody desk, stealing my hob nobs and crumbling them up in the wrapper and throwing them away!”

“I'll get you new ones.” He keeps glancing up at the feed from the gym and can't imagine how much longer the two of them are going to be able to keep it up. They're both wringing with sweat, skidding to a stop to touch the sixth mark on the floor for the third time before sprinting the sixty feet back to the start line and dropping down to begin a set of eighteen pushups followed by eighteen crunches.

“They need to stop before Jack gets back, because if I end up doing that because he thinks it's a good idea I will make them both pay.” Gwen leans forward, shaking her head in disbelief as she sips her soda through a straw. “How long are they going to do this?”

“This is the last set I think.” He's not sure if they're counting off or cursing each other, both of which he's caught them doing all week.

“She's going to look sickeningly good in those swimsuits. Did she show you the swimsuit she's buying? It's spectacular, well, all of them are since she's apparently picking up a different one for all five days.” Ianto let's himself not feel guilty about rolling his eyes at the wistful tone in Gwen's voice. “Help me come up with an excuse for why it's vital to the safety of planet Earth that I go with Cheyenne on Friday when she goes shopping.”

“No.” For a minute Ianto thinks they've both just collapsed flat onto their backs and intend to just lay there and argue, but Cheyenne's already got her legs together, pointed to the sky as she rolls her weight backwards onto her shoulders and hilariously enough, Owen follows along. “Look, Owen's doing yoga.” Gwen jostles him rolling up so that they're shoulder to shoulder and smirking.

“That's funny. He's good too, that means he _practices_ when no one's looking. So.” She leans a little closer, dropping her voice even though there's no one with in three levels of them. “Have you ever googled Owen before?”

“Finally Gwen!” Ianto reaches over, wrapping his hands in her sweater and shaking her gently until she giggles. “I have been not saying _anything_ for three bloody days, waiting for you to get nosy and start snooping! What did you find, because I heard some crazy shit. Crazy enough that I couldn't go googling without it being kind of tacky.”

“You mean you've known he's supposed to be some kind of pill king for almost a week and you didn't tell me?” She punches him in the arm and Ianto jabs her back with his elbow, rubbing the sore spot with a grimace.

“I _couldn't_! I can't tell you _everything_ I hear at home Gwen, it's not appropriate. Also, those people know where I sleep. That said, you know now, so what'd you find?”

Gwen, anal-retentive little copper that she is, has almost a dozen articles downloaded directly to her phone and she trades him the shiny still new iPhone for his spot in front of the monitors.

He's surprised by how many pictures there are. Owen at sixteen is slim and small, bordering on androgynous with his hair fallen over his eyes. He's never looking at a camera, always caught in profile or turning away and he never looks anything other than bored. Not in a perfectly tailored slate grey suit surrounded by a wall of lawyers coming out of a court house, not standing in front of a wall of the same lawyers with camera flashes going off in his face fast enough that it splashes his shadow up, long and starkly black against the actual wall behind himself, mouth compressed into a razor thin line, and even a court reporters drawing of him, perfectly still on the edge of a chair, head tipped down to speak into a microphone for a deposition.

“I kind of remember this. Jesus, it was on the bloody gossip shows all the time and Rhiannon was disgustingly obsessed with it because she thought Owen was cute. Oh god, my sister had a love on for _Owen_ , it's like being traumatized by it all over again!” He ignores Gwen's mirth at his expense, giving in to the urge to let his entire body shudder.

“Yeah, everyone kind of felt that way, the love on, not the my sister bit. Not me, cause I was a little young for it, bit too much of a tomboy still at thirteen to care about it much, but my mam was the same way. Called him 'poor lamb' every time it came on and then everyone just stopped talking about it all at once. I remembered he took his mum to court and I used to be jealous that I couldn't take my mum to court and sue for embarrassment. I thought about asking Andy for the family court files, but I'm unpleasantly sure that's taking it too far.”

“Regretfully. Besides, Cheyenne told me anyway. His mother kicked him out, but because he was still a minor he couldn't get into a honest-to-god _trust fund_ his granddad left him. He had to take her to court for it for almost a year and then apparently he worked very hard at making himself so boring that he wasn't worth the paper it would take to type his name.”

“I googled Cheyenne too.” That's unexpected. Gwen twists around from the monitor, reaching over his arm and flicking through a couple screens. “I don't know, it felt less like stalking if I did it to more than one person! She's never in the rags or anything, but she was in the society pages _all the time_ in America, Ianto.”

All the time is not an understatement. The stacks of photo albums in Cheyenne's home make a lot more sense if she's used to being photographed all the time. There are shots of her on red carpets in teetering heels and perfectly tailored gowns, tucked under the arm of her husband, beaming up at the icy blond with the green eyes, so tall they almost don't fit in the frame together. There are posed professional pictures with engagement and wedding announcements, and a perfectly timed shot of a tall, bald, black man in full dress tucking a folded flag into her small black gloved hands at a funeral.

“This is crazy. Every time I think I'm getting used to how much money she has, I find out something else weird. People take pictures of my girlfriend, Gwen! People take pictures of her and she occasionally indulges in soaps worthy epic hate matches with people that involve corporate espionage and poisonings. I'm not _kidding_ Gwen, stop laughing!” He's flailing a bit as she tries not to slide out of her chair laughing at him. “It's insane! I'm a secret agent for her majesty’s government charged with protecting the crown and the realm from aliens; how am I the least interesting person in my life?!”

“Pet, you're a secret alien hunter in what's kind of looking like a long term committed _polygamous_ relationship with a woman so rich she gets into daytime telly grudge matches and an immortal time traveler from the future. Interesting is a small petty word that does not _begin_ to cover your weirdness. I _promise_ , you're the most interesting person the rest of us know.”

“Aww, I don't know if I should hate you or be flattered.”

“Be flattered. So, who's her daytime tv grudge match with?”

“Oh, that's the best part, swallow your drink so you don't spew on the rift manipulator.” Gwen slurps the last dregs out of her can loudly, setting it down with a clatter and leaning forward eagerly. Ianto checks the monitor to make sure Cheyenne and Owen are still walking their way through their cool down and the SUV is still half way across town before leaning in towards Gwen. “It's Owen's mam. They are apparently mortal enemies, I kid you not.”

“Oh my God, Ianto, this is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. I love my life! Oh shit, shut up, they're heading up here.”

“How do I always end up _gossiping_ with you Gwen?” It's a rhetorical question. He and Gwen are comfortably alike; closest in age, working class poor local kids surrounded by geniuses, and heirs, and men who walked among the stars. They've made each other part of the little chain of islands they try to carve out of their lives to call normal.

“Because I'm awesome.”

**

Jack says he has to leave early in that way that means he's probably heading out to Flat Holm, so Ianto stays after everyone's gone, monitoring the Hub alone as he waits for an alert due at seven forty-two that's supposed to be another inert gaseous exchange. Owen calls them Rift Farts, because he's just that classy, and Ianto's still having a hard time getting the man he knows to jibe with the kind of back ground he's heard Cheyenne babble on about.

The exchange comes and goes with the alien atmosphere meeting the Earth air and flashing a beautiful, eerie pale red against the night sky over the bay for almost ten minutes before dissipating immediately. Ianto logs it, saving a live and still version of the footage with the brief report and dropping it into Jack's inbox as he shuts the building down into overnight mode.

No one texts him on the drive home to send him on a detour to the shops, but it's still closer to ten than not by the time Ianto steers around Cheyenne's truck in the middle of the driveway again and lets himself tiredly into the house. He doesn't bother heading upstairs to change, kicking off his shoes and trudging towards the family room where he can hopefully flop face first on the couch and try to convince Jack to cook him something _and_ bring it to him.

His plan is completely derailed by the fact that Jack and Cheyenne are sprawled along the entire sofa, ignoring the movie playing quietly on the flat screen to make out like a couple of teenagers. Ianto thinks it says a lot about how tired and hungry he is that his first thought is not to start stripping, but a sense of annoyance that he's going to have to scavenge up his own dinner.

“Hey you.” Jack sits up on his knees, slinging one arm over the back of the couch to rest his chin on his elbow and grin at Ianto. “Cottage pie for supper. Yours is in the stove staying warm.”

There's half a baking dish of meat, veg, and whipped potatoes waiting for him in a barely warm oven and Ianto leaves his jacket, tie, and shirt on the back of one of the kitchen chairs, taking his bowl full of dinner back in front of the television and dropping into the overstuffed chair next to the sofa to watch The Two Towers and ignore the pair on the couch. At least until he's ready to join them.


	2. Chapter 2

Ianto loves his days off. He flops into the center of the bed, pulling as many pillows as he can reach around himself and burying himself deep into the bedding to ignore the light and noise going on around him.

  
“Hold him please.” Cheyenne lifts the edge of the blanket and slides Indiana's still drowsy bulk into the curve of his arms. He's still in his pajamas, bottle gripped tightly in his hands and Ianto kisses the fine flyaway nest of curls flopping around on his round little head, arranges the blankets over him to help hold the weight of the bottle and drops into a light doze until Jack jostles him awake trying to wiggle the baby out of his grasp.

  
“Just getting him up and dressed. Dogs in or out?”

  
“In.” He tilts his face up into the bright, wicked daylight, letting Jack kiss him short and softly.

  
“Keep them off my side of the bed. Your phone's on the right nightstand.” They must be running late because Cheyenne doesn't even wait her turn, leaning over and pressing her lips to his shoulder blade before sliding off the bed. They troop out and minutes later the bed shakes as the dogs come running in, hurling themselves onto the bed across his legs and feet with unimpressed snorts and grumbles that he's the only one there before letting themselves stretch out full and heavy and following him into sleep.

  
It's a quarter to eleven by the time Ianto forces himself to get out of bed. Beelz and Lu waddle along behind him, flopping at his feet as he pours the last mug of coffee and leans against the island, flipping through the paper as he sips. The rift activity has made it to the front page of the 'B' section and Ianto takes a minute to admire the 'official' scientific response to the 'mysterious reoccurring phenomenon' that Ianto wrote up himself from a jumble of Jack's super technical chemical analysis of what atmospheres make what colors on Earth due to their compositions, Tosh's much simpler explanation of why Rift Farts make the sky change color, and a couple fairly plausible lies he came up with himself about pockets of frozen atmospheric gasses trapped in tiny meteorites that burn up on entry. He's been working on a rough draft for a while, trying to keep it scientific enough to impress and vague enough that most scientists will write it off as badly edited oversimplified tripe. Jack's left a sticky note on the middle of the page, next to a direct quotation from the blurb he arranged to automatically mail out to any emails that hit the filters for 'atmospheric disturbance' 'colors' and 'sky', his handwriting threatening to spill off every edge.

  
'Love it! New official line! Don't throw out the paper!'

  
Ianto doesn't throw out the paper. Instead he downs his mug of coffee and ignores the dogs who have his day off routine memorized and have already disappeared off to the garage breezeway and yanked down their leashes, circling him as he walks closely enough that Ianto stumbles over them twice.

  
“Oi! Fuck off then, I've got to get dressed first.” Cheyenne is less than impressed that he and Jack have added 'fuck off' to the long list of very specific list of commands she's taught her dogs, but they both slink off to their beds and lay there which is the point no matter how you say it. Ianto is pretty sure she'd do her nut if she knew he was retraining them in Welsh, but he doesn't speak bloody Chinese and if he's going to live with them, he's going to make sure they understand and obey him. It's cold outside. March in Wales is a damp chilly affair and Ianto considers being lazy and just sticking himself and the dogs on the treadmills again, but they've been running inside all winter so Ianto throws on thick socks, zips a fleece hoodie up over his vest and sweatpants, and digs around in the back of his side of the closet until he finds the trainers with the good grips in case there's any ice hiding on the side of the road.

  
Lucifer is waiting for him at the foot of the stairs, both leashes in his mouth and Beelzebub has parked himself next to the table where Ianto's keys are, both eyeing him hopefully as Ianto rolls his eyes, stepping around them to get a bottle of water from the flat they keep under the table with the keys on it.

  
“All right my wrinkled little meat bricks, ready to run?”

  
It's five kilometers down the tree lined stretch of their driveway that's so long it's technically a private road and then onto the not-private-but-still-highly-unused public road it dumps onto to get to the closest piece of civilization, a little petrol station where their road becomes the four-way that leads into downtown Cardiff, or in town Lisvane. The dogs stand, quivering with excitement as Ianto slips in the blue tooth and opens the music on his phone.

  
“Okay boys,” He clicks his tongue and they both start pulling at him. “Rhedeg.”

  
The air is silvery with drizzle, and the drive isn't quite slick as he takes off at a jog letting the dogs set the pace. It takes not quite half an hour to get to the store where Martin is behind the register, glasses sat slightly crooked on the end of his nose as he looks at the paper.

  
“See that red flash last night?”

  
“I did. Beautiful, wasn't it?” Ianto tosses a bag of skittles on the counter. “Two of the dog biscuits too please.” He unsnaps the little metal credit card case dangling from his keys, dropping five pounds on the counter.

  
“One of these days they'll admit it's aliens.” The old man scowls down at the paper and Ianto very carefully doesn't let the corner of his mouth twitch up. “Can't go six bloody months without round things and spiky things falling out of the bloody sky and they still keep telling us it's 'gas in the atmosphere'. Tossers.” Ianto has to go. He has to go _now_ because he has exactly thirty seconds of straight face left. He takes his change, grins maybe a bit too widely as he waves over his shoulder, and lets himself laugh as loudly as he wants as soon as they're back on the road home.

  
**

  
Ianto isn't surprised to get a text at a quarter past two telling him not to bother keeping dinner for Jack or Cheyenne. Thursdays are one of the full shifts Chy logs at the Hub, splitting her hours between working her way through the piles of back reports and items marked as untranslatable by Mainframe and making all the non-emergency calls Jack's supposed to deal with during the month that he's been shoving at Ianto since day one. Ianto doesn't miss trying to juggle his schedule to make room for the hours of phone time each week particularly dealing with Zilant since the Russians, for some reason, seem to hate him. It's just one of the ironies of life that his normal day off is typically the day Cheyenne and Jack spent trapped under piles of admin duties until after seven or later.

  
“Don't let anyone grab one of those wraps from the store down the street.” Ianto doesn't give Jack time to properly answer the phone, speaking as soon as he hears the line open. “They're sick. I'm on my way into town to get Indiana anyway, so I'll bring lunch. Greek sound good?” The jeans he threw on after his shower are fine, but Ianto heads up the stairs for a proper shirt to throw on over his vest.

  
“Greek sounds perfect. What are my odds of coffee?”

  
“High.” His red sweater is tossed over the back of the chair and Ianto yanks it over his head. “Have someone text me the order and I'll be there within the hour.”

  
**

  
Gwen's waiting at the loading docks when Ianto pulls in and she has the back door open before he cuts the engine, unlatching the carrier out of the car seat base and wiggling Indiana free of the backseat.

  
“Hello to you too Gwen, my day's been lovely, thank you for asking.”

  
“Your day off is not nearly as interesting as the baby.” It's hard to complain about Gwen taking the heavier of the options, even if Indy does come in a convenient carrier with handles while the Greek food is threatening to shift dangerously in his arms as Ianto unloads the two large brown paper sacks out of the Nissan.

  
“One of these days I'll remember that.” Indiana babbles cheerfully up at Gwen, reaching up and yanking on the dangling toys hung from his carrier. “How's today been?”

  
“Slow. Beautifully slow. So slow it's sexy. Jack says he'll bet all the money in the shame jar that there's a mini lull in the next two weeks.” There are few things in the world more awesome than a mini lull, that perfect forty-eight hour period where the rift, for whatever reason, stabilizes. They're mini paid holidays and Jack has a fantastic habit of counting them down to the last rift fluctuation out loud and then taking his entire team out to party from whatever time it goes down until the last man puts his drunk head down on the table and cries Uncle. Last time the party started at one in the afternoon and everyone woke up seventeen hours later still drunk on Tosh's floor with playing cards scattered around them and chips pressed into half-dressed bodies where they were apparently too drunk to finish playing strip poker.

  
“I'd rather he didn't, we've got enough saved in there for a pretty decent night out.”

  
“That's because it's ten quid a pop for getting caught making out during work hours and twenty for fucking and Jack can't keep his hands to himself.” It's kind of crazy how much more money the shame jar gets now that Jack's back. Gwen had come up with it three weeks into Jack's disappearance when defeat and exhaustion had the team taking sloppy shortcuts that never would have flown under the immortal man. The shames ran the gamut from forgetting to log out at night all the way up to taking alien tech off base without permission with a fine next to it ranging from a quarter to five pounds. They'd had almost three hundred in the massive glass jar the day Jack came back and now, half way through March, they've just barely doubled the amount and most of that has been paid out by Jack with significant contributions from himself and Cheyenne.

  
“And it's always the best twenty pounds I'll spend that day.”

  
It's absolutely a slow day. Tosh is over at the fabrication tables doing something that has her in goggles, heat proof gloves, and an apron. She starts stripping it all off as soon as she sees them, soldering iron slotting into its stand. Owen's sprawled in the middle of the floor, feet tucked under Gwen's desk and tablet dangling from some kind of ridiculous rig made of a sheet music stand and duct tape as he does crunches while scanning through backlog.

  
“It's a cruise Owen, not the Hunger Games. Come get your salad, princess.”

  
Indiana's highchair is already set up at the conference table and Cheyenne's in Jack's spot, legs thrown over the arm of his chair as she spins it in circles, hand flying across a note pad.

  
“Да, конечно. Капитан Харкнесс будет рада отправить эти показания.” She looks up, waving cheerfully at him and making enormous gleeful pantomimes at their son who starts kicking and flailing in his attempt to get to his mummy. “Вы, а также. До свидания.” She drops the notepad on the table and holds out her arms imperiously. “Gimmie! My _baaaaaaaby_!” Her sense of absurd over dramatics has obviously been passed along just fine as Indy hurls his arms straight out as well, screeching for her happily at the top of his lungs.

  
“Mamamamamamaaaaaaaaa!” Ianto drops the bags on the table and takes Indiana out of his carseat, pausing by Chy just long enough for the two of them to give each other big noisy kisses and then ignoring their perfectly identical pouts as he deposits the child into high chair.

  
“Apparently fussy there wouldn't eat lunch at nursery today. Also, we've now officially eaten too much Greek in the last five months, because the Milios family knows Indy and exactly how fussy he gets when he decides to skip his meals because I walked out of there with extra Halva and Krema-something Mila-something.”

  
“Apples and banana's pudding. It's fantastic, if he doesn't slobber in his bowl I might eat what he doesn't.” Jack comes in and Ianto doesn't have to turn around to know he's reaching out for the biggest of the two bags, so he reaches over and yanks it across the table away from Jack's searching hands.

  
“First, don't eat after the baby. He slobbers in everything Jack and it's gross. Also, eating what kids don't is the quickest way to get fat.”

  
“Hahaha, I'll _never_ get fat. Where's my souvlaki?”

  
“It's not all your souvlaki. Somebody get the dishes.”

  
Lunch is good. Indiana abandons his chubby orange plastic spoon after the second bite of pudding, eating with both hands and smearing it over every inch of his face as soon as one of his parents wipes it clean.

  
“Okay, I have appointments in London tomorrow, so what time do you want me here for outfitting?” Outfitting is Ianto's least favorite part of undercover work. Every piece of tech Cheyenne and Owen are taking has to be calibrated. Some of them will have to be sized. Refreshers will have to be run on setting mini cams, and weapons have to be picked, serviced, and stored for travel. It's tedious work and he and Tosh always end up doing the majority of it now that Suzie's gone.

  
“We'll do Owen first, so not until five. Tosh, Ianto, barring emergencies I want you two to take the morning off and come in around noon to start on Owen. It's going to be a long day. Cheyenne, that means the car too. If you're going to be driving it to the docks then it needs to be tagged and linked in to the Torchwood system.” Cheyenne has two vehicles, a Honda SUV that gets most of her wear and tear, and a 2007 aggressively yellow Corvette that used to be her husband’s and that no one is allowed to drive but her. She grimaces a bit and nods slowly.

  
“Alright, I'll bring it in, but you have to be seriously careful with it Jack.”

  
“Good.” Jack turns his gaze on Gwen. “So, Gwen, what have you been working on today?”

  
**

  
Calibrating the contacts on Owen is taking entirely too long, eating up Ianto's scant reserves of patience on a day that's sucked since he opened his eyes this morning. Owen keeps blinking too soon, or shifting his eyes every time Indiana makes a noise from his playpen, which in the man's defense have only gotten louder and angrier as the baby stands there, shaking the rail until the entire structure sways and rattles with his impressive baby rage. He's going red in the face, glowering fiercely at Toshiko's desk and whatever, probably deadly, thing on it that has caught his interest and remains distressingly out of reach.

  
“Someone needs to come get my spawn or do these bloody calibrations for me because I can't deal with both of them!” Of course the day Cheyenne's in London and they're neck deep in covert prep is the day his sister is running a temperature of a hundred and three and can't babysit. The monitor flashes that fucking glyph on screen again, the message 'calibrations failed' blinking on the screen under it.

  
“I'll do it. If I have to just stand here and stare at something, I can do it holding the baby.” Owen steps out of range before Ianto can tell him he's started the program running again, and he lets his head thump down on the desk with a groan as the multi-ringed circle with the not-quite-Asian cuneiform slashed across it flashes up again. “Come here you livid little thing.” Indy shrieks with indignation, arching himself backwards as Owen picks him up and then takes him _away_ from whatever it is he was intent on stealing. “Oh, look at that angry little face. What is it with you Welsh, you look like belligerent rocks when you're angry.”

  
“Eat shit Owen.” It doesn't help that Indiana does indeed look like an angry little brick when he turns that shade of red and draws his shoulders up around his ears to glower. “All right, hold him up to eye level and let's try this for the _seventh_ time.” It finally works. Owen makes stupid faces every time he has to shift his gaze for Ianto to align the axes, Indiana is trying his best to mimic them back, and Ianto has footage of the entire thing. Fifteen minutes later the camera is scrolling smoothly, following Owen's every glance and when Ianto types in that he's a frog faced cocksucker, he shifts the baby to one arm and flips Ianto the bird. “Alright, configuration complete. Keep them in an hour to make sure they've locked your bios in and we'll drop that one in your arms in Jack's lap and go get your pathogen and generals done.”

  
Everyone else is in Jack's office, Toshiko and Jack soldering tiny chips and circuits into Owen's iPhone while Gwen sits curled over on the couch following Tosh's tutorial for setting a false paper trail for public consumption for the last five years of Owen's life.

  
“Right, I've got the contacts configured but we're off to do inoculations, so who wants this?” It's a rhetorical question when Gwen's the only person without something sharp or hot in her hands, but she still looks up at him startled when Owen plops the baby onto the couch next to her.

  
“Oh, but I'm...” Gwen's mouth tips down in a little frown as she scans the room. “apparently the only one not doing something dangerous. Never mind. Come here you, let's copy and paste.”

  
The Torchwood inoculations are brutal. Five shots in a row giving a broadband, short term resistance to most otherworldly poisons and germs. They also burn like a rotten bastard going in and tend to make everyone who takes them nauseous and light sensitive for about an hour. Ianto turns the lights as low as he can comfortably work under and drops one of the pink kidney shaped sick buckets on the table next to Owen.

  
“Let's get your shirt off and get this done so you can lay down and be back on your feet in time to do Cheyenne.” Owen doesn't say anything, just looks at him very earnestly and lets his grin grow wider. “Twat.”

  
“I'd like to point out that I let a couple hundred comments drift off into the ether and restrained myself to only grinning.”

  
“Because you're a saint Owen; we'll build you a shrine and everything one day.” The first injection is a fair representation of how awful the entire process is. A not quite florescent yellow, and almost viscous so that it has to be injected slowly with a tendency to leave the smell of burnt sugar echoing in your brain. Owen clenches his fist, forcing the veins in his forearm to bulge upwards to the thin hollow metal needle as Ianto takes his slim wrist in hand. “Deep breath. In, out, and in once more.” He lets Owen take the last easy breath he'll take in an hour and stabs forward at the right angle, piercing the thin skin and vein halfway up his arm. The needle slides in smoothly and Ianto preps and attaches the transfer set that will allow him to swap out the medication without having to re-inject, making sure he has everything he'll need to inject and bandage nearby and open before popping the first monoject onto the transfer. He keeps his pace carefully measured as he depresses the plunger, squeezing the arm in his grip reassuringly as he feels the medic fight back the urge to flinch away from the acid sear racing up his arm. The last of it empties out of the syringe and Ianto pops the empty casing off, sliding on the second dose and shifting his grip on Owen's arm to the top so that Owen can wrap his fingers around Ianto's forearm instead to squeeze.

  
There's already a light sheen of sweat beading up across his temples and the bridge of his nose as Owen hangs his head and takes breaths so perfectly spaced that he must be counting them already. Ianto doesn't bother bracing him for the next one, he's already as tense as he can be without shifting the needle, just injecting the every so lightly tinted transparent blue in faster. There's a rhythm to this, swapping out syringes trying to time the injections so that the discomfort and nausea never really spike and Ianto ignores the fact that by the fourth vial Owen has swayed forward, free hand clenched around the lapel of the deep blue suit Ianto's wearing, sweaty head resting in the join of shoulder and throat as he clings to anything he can to choke back the discomfort.

  
“All right, hold your breath.” Trial and error of the most disgusting kind has taught them all that the only way to take the fifth injection is to hold their breath until the entire small 2 milliliter dose is injected. Any attempt to blink, speak, or breathe during that time sets off a violent cycle of vomiting that leads to infiltrated veins, cleaning around someone who cannot be around the strong scents of cleaning agents, and wearing scrubs while the laundry runs. Owen presses his forehead as hard as he can into Ianto collar bone, hard enough that Ianto will probably bruise, and tugs once at the jacket he's gripping for dear life. This part is a ballet. Ianto takes the gauze he's got already prepped with tape and puts it tightly over the site, injects the solution as quickly as he can, and whips the entire iv setup out of Owen's arm with five entire seconds to spare before the smaller man makes a low whining noise deep in his chest and begins vomiting violently into the bowl.

  
Ianto takes his time disposing of everything, making extra sure there's not a single cap that has rolled away or drop spilt on the floor. He's heard Gwen joking with Owen that he's gone from 'kind of a neat freak' to 'Super OCD man' and he doesn't care because his kid is crawling now and has already managed to escape his pack-and-play twice, leading to the largest unarmed manhunt ever to happen in the Hub and the second biggest remodel in recent Torchwood history as they did their best to baby proof a building never meant for any but the most brilliant and careful of adults. The floor is clean, and everything else goes in the neon green bio-waste bag with the standard bio-hazard sign around a cartoon alien head to be dropped in the incinerator later. Ianto turns back to the table and takes the full bowl from Owen's trembling hands without looking, tipping it in the sink but not rinsing it, no matter how gross it is, because the sound of the water ringing off the metal basin will set Owen off again. He settles a clean bowl on the table next to the doctor's head where he's curled in a miserable fetal position, panting through his mouth. Ianto yanks one of the light hospital blankets out of the linen cupboard under the sink and an ice pack from the freezer that he slides into a thick soft black sleeve.

  
“Alright, blanket so you don't start shaking, icepack for your head, and fresh sick bowls are by your left hand. Do you need anything else before I go Owen?” Ianto keeps his voice as soft as he can, bringing the lights down until he can barely see the stairs and settling the icepack across the base of the medic's neck.

  
“Guh.”

  
“Good to know. I'm going to go rescue Gwen and then I'll be at my station. Knock something over if you need me.”

  
Gwen does not want to be rescued. Gwen wants to trade, offering to take Indiana up for a walk on the quay if Ianto takes over editing Owen's public paper trail, and he hates her a little for it because he would _love_ a walk in the early spring sunshine with his kid before it disappears and Gwen's going to get to do it because she's not got a single one of the macros built into the program running, doing everything by hand and at this point the only way everything will be done in time to set up and do it over again with Cheyenne is if Ianto lets Gwen take the baby for a walk and starts in on finishing up _her_ work. Also, she's a sympathetic vomiter who cannot be left alone to babysit Owen while he's emptying his guts all over the autopsy bay unless Ianto wants a bigger mess to clean up when he gets back.

  
“Know that I resent you getting the walk while I type and wipe away sick.” Gwen gleefully plops her tablet onto his outstretched hands, ruffling his hair as she grabs Indiana's little wool coat off the rack next to where Jack's goes and wiggling him into it despite the fact that he wants nothing to do with a coat when Jack and Tosh have little tiny shiny bits of metal and glass sprawled across the desk and are _touching_ them without him.

  
“You'll get over it.” Indiana lets out a violent shriek when Gwen refuses to drop him into Jack's lap and Ianto can hear Owen retching from here as it echoes out through the open office door. “And so will you. Come on fussy pants, Auntie Gwen's taking you shopping. You need to get your mummy some nice 'I'll miss you' flowers for when she goes and a prezzie for when she comes home.” Ianto and Jack both reach for their wallets at the same time and Gwen rolls her eyes, disappearing out the door before a single billfold makes it out, like she hasn't just added more work to Ianto's plate later when he has to almost wrestle the receipts from her to have the money reimbursed from his account to hers.

  
“And that's the shielding on the phone...done!” Tosh brandishes her tiny soldering iron in the air victoriously, shoving her goggles up on her head. “Owen can now access Mainframe from anywhere on this side of the planet without having to piggyback off someone else's satellites, but I make no promises for anything east of Pakistan and west of Alaska.”

  
“Perfect. You're brilliant Tosh.” She's got everything layered back into place, and obviously loves their job, particularly when a sweep of 'the not fantastic Mr. Fix-it' as Suzie dubbed it years before his arrival, seals the phone back together. So far it only seems to repair broken ceramics and seal up Apple products, but it's saved them a small fortune in mugs over the years, even if now they're getting to be pretty certain it's some kind of Apple repair tool from the not too distant future.

  
“Yes I am. Ianto, give me that and go make me coffee. I'll get Owen taken care of, you take a break and make sure everything's lined up to start over again when Cheyenne gets here.”

  
**

  
Cheyenne shows up forty-five minutes late.

  
They know she's coming before they see her, because the throaty roar of the Corvette is echoing down the tunnel to the loading bay. Ianto keeps his hands jammed in his pockets, rocking on his heels in annoyance as the yellow 'Vette comes around the corner, music thudding loud enough from the back to make the trunk vibrate and engine rumbling low as Cheyenne idles for a moment before killing the switch.

  
“You're late.” The door swings open wide and she steps out without bothering to disguise her rolling eyes. He supposes she's been busy, if you can count walking through stores and sitting in a beautician’s chair busy. Her hair's been blown out into a straight fall down her back, held back off her face by what he's pretty sure are shades that cost about what his sister pays in rent every month.

  
“Really? Wow, I'm so glad you told me that, because otherwise I would have no idea what to call the fucking hour I spent on the parking lot that is the M4. Seriously, what the hell is with that? I left twenty minutes early and I'm still almost an hour late. Owen looks like shit, why does Owen look like _that_?” She doesn't bother hiding the disgusted crinkle to her nose as she makes a dismissive gesture where her new glossy French tips flick out and flip up and down, encompassing everything from his sweaty fly-away hair to his pale skin, bruised eyes, and rumpled clothes.

  
“Because I got inoculated against biological attacks an hour and a half ago and it sucks. You'll get yours soon and then you too, can look like _this_.” He makes the exact same sweeping flick of his fingers mockingly.

  
“I better not. Like I spent all day getting waxed, buffed, pressed, and poked to end up looking like someone punched me in the face and threw me in a dumpster.” She crosses her arms, cutting her eyes to Jack and actually stomping her foot as he shrugs. “Jack!”

  
“Don't be a brat, baby. It's a couple of shots, it's not going to hurt your very cute hair.” She flashes a glossy red grin at Jack, so apparently she's just annoyed with Ianto which is just fine, because she's not his favorite right now either when her kid's been screaming angrily at him since Daddy picked him up from nursery instead of Mummy, Owen has left bruises around his wrist and Ianto has another four hours of work to do to help Tosh and Jack calibrate all of Cheyenne's tech _on top_ of however long it'll take to get the Torchwood systems into her foreign car and did he mention she's _late_?

  
“It is pretty cute, isn't it? Also, just so you know, someone recognized me. No idea who they work for, Sterling isn't as big a deal here as we are at home, but I got recognized sometime between getting blown out and the Burberry flagship; by the time I got to Lord & Taylor a couple photo hounds were waiting. I may or may not be online in the 'seen heres' tomorrow, cross your fingers for not, but the good news is I won't be making print. Probably.”

  
“Cheyenne!” Ianto can't keep the sharp annoyance out of his voice because the public life of a millionaire/secret life saving the world thing only works for Batman. “It's not funny!”

  
“Okay, you're getting on my nerves. I don't know what crawled up your ass, and I'm sorry you need a nap and a snack or something, but this happens okay? Sometimes people take pictures of me doing regular shit for reasons I'm still not sure of and then it fucking blows over in a day because I'm not one of those drunk heiresses with no responsibilities or underwear crawling out of the car at two a.m..”

  
“No, you're the one fucking two blokes when you aren't dealing with _aliens._ Trust me, they'll think either of those is better than no knickers and Torchwood gets plenty of attention already!”

  
Jack's whistle is loud enough in the cement garage to cut over their raised voices and send Owen cursing them and stumbling back into the dark, quiet Hub to rest.

  
“Stop it! You!” He points to Cheyenne. “Get anything you bought out of the car and into the Hub please. Gwen has been drooling in her lap all day wanting to peek through everything and Toshiko is entirely too much of a lady to ever do such a thing, but there's been an obnoxious debate _all day_ going on about Fendi versus La Perla that I really _really_ want you to end so I never have to hear it again.” Cheyenne blows her new, perfectly sculpted fringe out of her eyes and flips the seat out of the way, digging bags upon endless bags out of the entirely too small space between the seat and the back of the car.

  
“I'm dropping these off and then I will be _right back_. Do _not_ touch my husband’s car. Don't turn the engine on, don't move it, don't pop the hood. He put some modifications in and if you fry the engine on his baby fucking around with it I swear to Christ, the guilty party will get _real_ fucking tired of sleeping in the guest house before I get over it.” She stomps off through the door into the hub, straight hair falling down to swish below the curve of her bum in black jeans that fit like they were sewn onto her as she juggles bags that are probably too heavy for her little hands and Ianto doesn't care because if she can't carry that much shite than she shouldn't have bought it all.

  
“She's not serious about waiting for her, is she?”

  
Jack comes over, wrapping his arms around Ianto's shoulders and nuzzling at the spot behind his ear that makes it hard to stay angry.

  
“That was her husband's car. He did every repair and modification to it himself, which you already know. She's very serious. You're kind of cranky today, do you need an hour down? You can sack out in the bunker with Indy for a while after we deal with the car. Gwen is more than capable of getting dinner before she goes home, Tosh and I can calibrate, Owen can do the shots. I'd send you home, but wrestling Indy away from his mother won't be much more relaxing than just staying.”

  
“I'm not _actually_ a child in need of a nap and a bloody cookie, despite what Cheyenne thinks.”

  
“Can _I_ have a nap and a cookie then, because I'm tired of doing this fiddily shit, annoyed that traffic was bad and she only called once to say she'd be 'a little late', hungry for something that I know is too greasy to have around sensitive stomachs, _and_ your kid is being a little monster today.”

  
“Oh thank God, I thought that was just me thinking that. They're spoiled brats today Jack, the two of them; a perfectly matched set of self-indulgent drama queens.”

  
“And we adore them anyway. Calm down. You're stressed because your _normally_ fantastically placid baby is acting up right before you're in charge for a week, _he's_ stressed because the two of you started snipping and bitching last night and have yet to stop, and Cheyenne is most certainly being both a brat and a princess because she's starting to regret demanding to be in on this raid and wouldn't admit how scared she is under fire. We're all strung out, but I wouldn't have let her go, tickets or not, if I didn't think it was a perfectly safe identify and tag. Their main goal is to bump into him and get that tracker on him, capturing is not the priority okay? She'll eat some tiny portions of tiny finger foods, drink her way through several boring parties with Owen, and at some point they'll find the target and find some reason to touch him and they're done. That easy. Sometimes things _actually_ work that easy, even for Torchwood, okay?”

  
“No.” It's hard to mumble sulkily when Jack is nibbling on him. “Stop, I'm being annoyed and huffy and you're ruining it.”

  
“No, you stop because while it's just as strangely attractive on you as it is on her, the sulky aggression isn't helpful. Come on, I get to see you stripped down to a vest with oil on your face and a wrench in your hand.” He's already tugging on the buttons to Ianto's waist coat. “Don't ruin it for me by scowling the entire time. Get out of anything you don't want ruined, I'll get the parking bay lit and set up.”

  
Cheyenne's down in the locker room, throwing the clothes she's stripping out of into her locker as hard as she can. She's got her work jeans, the ones that are more frayed patches and gaping holes than solid fabric, yanked up over her hips and one of Jack's vests that turned pink the only time she tried to do the laundry yanked over her head and tied up behind the small of her back in a knot to keep it from flopping around her as she moves. She looks at him once, a silent little glower from the corner of her eye as he starts stripping down to a not too dissimilar outfit.

  
“Damnit, Ianto you know it's real hard to be mad at you when you're wearing your ass out jeans.” She slams her locker door shut as he shucks out of his boxers and into his paint splattered denims. They're ready to die any day now and the long rips across the back of his mid-thigh have become several gaping tears trailing down to his knees and held together mostly by the seams.

  
“You shouldn't be bloody mad at me anyway, I didn't _do_ anything!” He yanks a black bandanna out of his locker and neatly hangs his suit before slamming the door just as hard.

  
“You were yelling at me before I got the fucking car turned off! I know I was late okay. I left early but this is only the second time I've ever driven from London to Cardiff and I misjudged traffic. It happens. I called.”

  
“You're not taking this seriously enough Cheyenne!” He slams his hand into the locker as she goes to turn away. “That's what I'm talking about! This is about more than going on your stupid snob cruise and looking better in a bikini than Owen's mum. Looking better than a woman twice your age in half the fabric isn't an accomplishment, it's just spite.” She glares at him, trying to go around and stomps her foot, lips pulled back to snarl as he pins her between himself and the locker. “This isn't a _game_ Cheyenne, and I need you to pay attention because every Torchwood mission, _all of them_ have a mortality rate and if you think I've got it in me to raise our _kid_ by myself you're so far off the bloody pitch it's insane. Fuck your Eighty-seven million dollars, your spite matches with people, and whatever you else you have on your mind. I need you to stop it and pay attention to what we're actually doing!”

  
“Boy, get the fuck...”

  
“And stop talking to me like I'm a goddamned child! I have had this shite going wrong around me on a weekly basis for years now. I'm telling you, as someone who's fucking done this and walked away, as well as a higher ranked agent than you to stop pissing around.”

  
“You did not.”

  
“Yes I did. Stop fucking off and do your _job_ Cheyenne. If you're freaking out, you need to focus here and find another goddamned outlet for it, am I clear?”

  
“Wow, I find this both awkward and uncomfortable as I'm not sure whether I'm interrupting a dressing down or a domestic, but Jack says hurry up and leave your earpieces in next time.” Tosh stands, leaning against the wall at the end of the locker bank, eyes politely unimpressed as they flit across the two of them glowering at each other from three inches apart. She rolls off the wall with her hips, heels clicking away and Ianto doesn't bother watching where she's going, still watching Cheyenne.

  
“Just tell me yes Cheyenne. All I'm asking you to do is say you'll make what's happening here your first priority. Torchwood and safety over careless civilian please.” He steps back and Cheyenne arches one eyebrow, gives him this long slow condescending look, and marches past him without saying a fucking word.

  
Because she is a bitch today and he's not sure he can take it one more second.

  
“Wrap it up you two; two more thrusts or less please; we have things to do and a time limit.” Jack's voice is past coyly suggestive and straight to jolly description over the coms as Ianto slides his back in and he lets himself indulge in the urge to kick the shit out of her locker before hurrying out the door to catch up.

  
**

  
By the time he makes it to the garage she already has the Corvette pulled into the far bay on the skids, leaning in under the hood with Jack.

  
“It's just two switches, here and here. Disarm those, by hitting that there and...” There's a small chirp that Ianto recognizes as alien just by too many years listening to otherworldly tech. “There. That the trunk and engine safe to go in.”

  
“Little superhero dramatic isn't it?” If he had said that, she would have ripped him a new one, but for Jack she laughs.

  
“Says the man who actually has the word Torchwood written on our official vehicle. This was his work car actually, so yes, it was rigged to fuck up and shut down if anyone tampered with it. Can't have aliens stealing classified shit and fucking off in your own car, right? Come on.” She steps down off the milk crate she's standing on -of all the ridiculous shit, she really needs to stand on a milk crate to look down into the engine- popping the trunk open. “This big one here is fake. Not so the rest of them, so if you could not knock out my sub woofers I would be thrilled thanks.” Cheyenne doesn't seem to care if the other person working on her car knows how to do it apparently, but that won't stop her from being pissed if he messes it up, so Ianto leans in on the other side of Jack, watching her guide Jack's hands over the black knapped felt. “Press there and the speaker lifts off and this is the weapons compartment.”

  
“All right. I can work around this. Are you really going to hover around watching us work?”

  
“Yes.”

  
“No. That was a rhetorical question. I'm not sure why you even changed. Go get your kid from Gwen so she can get some real work done please.” Jack tosses his shirt in a sort of vague out of the way direction and Cheyenne flicks her hair back over out of her eyes.

  
“If I hadn't just gotten my nails done, I'd do it myself.”

  
“No you wouldn't, because you don't have the grip strength for the manual tools and I don't have pneumatic drills that can work on this engine, nails or no. Go get your kid and you get some work done too.”

  
**

  
Gwen is the only one left who's not hating this outfitting by the time Ianto follows Jack into the main workspace. On the monitors they can see the cameras in the locker room and where Gwen's fussing over things they pull out of bags, taking reference shots of Cheyenne in them and then measuring her.

  
“Gwen, if you two could bring your dressing up to the main floor, we need to get started on the contacts.” Ianto looks around the room quickly and leans back into the coms. “Who's got Indy?”

  
“Swap to camera two, he's in his bouncy swing hanging in the doorway.” He is, strapped in and pogoing in place, clutching a new toy; some kind of chunky toy tablet with huge buttons and a digital screen that makes faces at him when he pokes it.

  
“Well grab him and come upstairs. Owen wants me to do the contact configurations as soon as possible. Apparently keeping them in and watching the 'adjusting' message flash every fifteen minutes while trying to recover was torture. We'll get them calibrated and you two can go back to dressing up. Bring up the measurements for anything being wired.”

  
Everything else goes entirely too well. Smooth, professional, and well-practiced from a morning working out a time line and standard operating procedure; they've gotten everything but the injections taken care of by eight-thirty and Ianto lets himself flop gratefully onto the open fold away in Jack's office with Indiana, cuddling the sleepy little body as he wiggles him into the spare pajamas from the diaper bag and settles him in his typical pillow fort with a bottle. Ianto's afraid it says a lot about their parenting, and not much of it good, that Indy goes to sleep on Jack's office couch as easily as he does his own cot at home, snuggling right down on the quilt off of Jack's bed and asleep before he can suck down a quarter of the bottle in his mouth.

  
He leaves the door cracked because he's just planning on running the bottle down to the fridge so the smell of formula doesn't have Myfanwy sticking her head in Jack's office and getting stuck trying to steal bottles again. She's awkwardly in love with the baby, shuffling around where he's been, stealing his left overs and dropped things, and not allowed any closer than five feet to him because Ianto can't shake the feeling that she's trying to figure out how to pick Indiana up and get him to the aerie and then he'd have to kill his dinosaur. Instead he makes it as far as putting the bottle in the fridge, and getting halfway up the catwalks when Owen starts yelling for spare hands at the top of his lungs.

  
“Fuck. Tosh, can you?” He points up at Jack's office. “Just for a mo?”

  
“On it.” She doesn't say anything about the fact that she was in the middle of putting on her coat to go home for the night, just takes it with her up to Jack's office as Ianto stomps down to the med bay because everyone does this the first time they get injected. They freak out the second they realize the drugs are already making them sick and start fighting the IV and need to be restrained.

  
At first glance Cheyenne looks restrained. Jack is behind her, using the long twist she's pulled her hair back into as a handle to aim her one handedly at the bucket next to her, the other hand encircling her arm above the bend of the elbow keeping it perfectly steady, Owen is in front of her, bracing her by the forearm and pinning her legs to the table with his own, and Ianto is annoyed that he kept Tosh and made a wasted trip until he sees the vials, one of them broken, scattered across the floor.

  
“Good. About time. Come get her. Every time I let her go to swap she infiltrates. I need to set up a fresh site on her other arm.”

  
More precisely, every wave of nausea has her jack-knifing around herself, trying to curl up into some small ball and she keeps trying to bend her arm and driving the needle through and out the other side of her veins. The same thing happens to Tosh when she gets her yearly top offs, because she and Cheyenne are still three to six inches shorter and fifteen or more pounds lighter than recommended for the smallest effective dose. Ianto gathers the rolling syringes on his way across from the stairs, putting them back on the teetering tray and swapping his grip for Owen's. He rips tape with his teeth, trying to ignore the way she hasn't actually stopped gagging and vomiting at all, just retching and gasping constantly as he tapes gauze over the old transfer set and flicks it out with a flip of the wrist, dropping it in the green sharps bucket dangling off the cart.

  
“I might have to institute a height/weight requirement for Torchwood personnel at this rate.” Jack's working his fingertips as soothingly across her scalp as he can when the rest of his grip is holding her head out of a bucket full of bile. “You might be too small to ride this ride Dr. Morgan.”

  
“Oh God you idiots fucking killed me!” Her voice is tight with hysteria and thick with even less pleasant things than that. “Stop, I'm done, I can't take the…” Ianto looks up at the ceiling as her words disappear behind a wet rush. “Rest of them.”

  
“You've got to. Just one is worse for you than all of them together.” Owen has her left arm prepped and kicks Ianto's ankle in warning before whipping her through the last four at twice the speed Ianto could have, proving years of medical school must be good for something after all. By the time the last one goes in, she's hanging limply between them, held up by little more than Jack's grip on her hair and arm as she tries to slide sobbing off the table to the floor. “No, no no, let's stay off the dirty floor and on the nice table, okay?” Owen's already got her bandaged on that arm as well and is already following along with the rest of the initial inoculation procedure, hooking her up to monitors and machines. “Stay on the nice table where the machines can reach you.”

  
“Stop. Not six.”

  
“Says the girl trying to hide under the table. Lay her down, get her covered over, come get me if her numbers spike more than twenty when she's vomiting, drop more than five points at a time when she isn't, or haven't gone back to the base reading in white in an hour. I'll go sit with the offspring, and let Tosh head home.”

  
Cleaning up is foul. The kidney bowl was not up to the task, and there's a slick of sick from where someone kicked the rubbish bin through the mess to get it underneath her head. Jack has the grace to at least look apologetic about perching on the table with Cheyenne curled face down in his lap while Ianto is on the floor scrubbing vomit with fucking salt and lemon juice. He can't even bitch about how much he hates his day today while he does it, because they're stuck to whispers quiet enough to be useless and the bare minimum of light possible which is looking like it's still too much for her as she tries to yank the edge of Jack's coat over her head, only to fumble it immediately out of the way to dry heave into her new sick bowl. At least she's not like Owen, who will throw things at the light until someone lowers it further.

  
His knees are killing him by the time Ianto stands up, and his hands sting from the salt and citrus juice that's been working its way through his skin while he's been cleaning. The broken glass is swept away and the spilt chemicals from it have been neutralized, even though the neutralizer sent Chy back into another cycle of retching and heaving up bile. She's curled over Jack, torso resting over his legs as her head dangles limply off the edge next to his knee and the hand that's been hanging uselessly off the table, flopped just at eye level the entire time he was scrubbing jerks out, yanking at his jacket as she tugs him closer and he goes because he'd have to be an utter bag of dicks to yank against someone feeling that badly. He's looming over her, close enough that her face is smashed into the wool blend of his suit before she shoves her hand in his trouser pocket and lets herself slump completely.

  
“Cheyenne, I can't stand here all night so you can hide under my jacket and not hold your own head up.”

  
“Can too. Please? 'M _sick_.” He lets his fingers rest in the soft clammy dip of her throat where her pulse is thumping rabbit quick. “Jus' a minute. Rub my head and don't be mad.” He rubs her head, mostly because Jack's already staring at the bolt of his jaw where Ianto's very much looking at anything not Jack and the expression he knows is on Jack's face that's going to very sincerely ask 'what the fuck else are you two fighting about _now_ '. Ianto works his fingers at the nape of her neck, above the icepack in the fuzzy black sleeve and below the spill of her hair over across Jack's hands and doesn't notice she's fallen asleep twisted in this absurd position until she jerks and snores against him.

  
“I'm starting to think she's not kidding when she says she's not sure if she's ever been told no and had to actually accept it. Get her off me.” Jack is laughing at him and his very deserved indignation because Jack is a bastard sometimes, even if he's moving her slowly backwards while Ianto untangles her slim fingers from his pocket lining. Life's not fair sometimes. Ianto get inoculated and looks like a zombie; greyish-white with huge bruised bags under his eyes, and a bad habit of panting through his teeth when nauseous that leaves his upper lip pulled back like a snarling dog. Cheyenne doesn't look like a snarling zombie dog. Her lashes are long and deeply black as they flutter over washed out cheeks and smudged shadows under her eyes and somehow she's still got stain traces of her lipstick clinging to her trembling lips, leaving her looking like the one fuckable extra from a Tim Burton movie.

  
“Go get off your feet. Tell Owen I said he's in charge of walk-through for the next hour and then he can go home.”

  
The doctor is reading on Ianto's normal side of the pull out by the time Ianto stomps into Jack's office and he couldn't care less, crawling up the thin mattress and flipping the quilt open so that it covers him as well as the tiny body he wraps himself around.

  
“I've cleaned more vomit today than anyone should. I'm taking a kip, Jack says check your readings yourself.”

  



	3. Chapter 3

Ianto doesn't remember getting home. He remembers, kind of, Jack tapping him awake; voice rumbling on about three of them being sleepy and mean and then nothing else until now, coming awake in the middle of their bed.

The side of Ianto's pinkie finger is familiarly wet, and he cracks one eye open to see that Indiana is indeed in his favorite place, curled nose to knees on Jack's chest gnawing on his father's hand where Ianto's curled into Jack in the middle of the night. Chy's scrunched up, twisted and sprawled across the mattress so that she's somehow managed to be curled up onto his back and twisted under his legs at the same time. Sometimes Ianto wonders why they bothered going two sizes up when they typically end up in the approximate square footage of a queen every night, with Chy's legs and hair taking up more of it than anything else. Weekend days like this are nice, lazing around in bed, on-call while the loser of the weekly name pull sits twiddling their thumbs in the Hub as a one-man skeleton crew.

“I can feel you awake over there. Go make me breakfast.” Jack doesn't stop grinning up at the ceiling, running his hands back and forth over the tight bow of Indy's back as he rumbles under his breath. “I want French toast.”

“You must be mistaking me for a restaurant. Like hell I'm climbing out of the _middle_ to make you French toast. Plus, I'm pinned, she's on my back and he has my pinkie.”

“He's on my chest, you're on my arm, Chy is on both of us. I win, go make breakfast.”

“ _I'll_ go make breakfast if everyone stops talking for another half hour.” Cheyenne drools on his back, trying to mumble around her thumb and Ianto thinks it's probably sad that he's used to it. That said, any reason for him not to be the first one out of bed is good right now, so he uses the force to make Jack pull the blankets back over his shoulder.

“Why are you staring at me from one eye like you've got to take a crap and your legs are broken?”

“I'm using the force to make you cover me back up.”

“Movies have lied to you Ianto. There are no Jedi. There will never be Jedi. _I_ am not a Jedi and Boeshane is not whatever-you-call-it.” Jack _knows_ what they call it. Jack knows, and is pretending he doesn't to try and distance himself from Ianto's nerdy awesomeness for some strange reason. Jack also shifts just enough to snag the trailing end of the duvet between his fingers and flip it up over Ianto because Ianto's nerd awesome and knows that the trick to using the force is to say over and over 'I'm using the force' until someone else does what you want for you.

“No, _I'm_ a Jedi because you just covered me up. The force is strong with me.” Behind him he can feel Chy shaking as she tries not to giggle.

“I covered you up because you asked.”

“No I didn't. I _told_ and the force did the rest.” It's not worth trying to sleep longer, so he opens both eyes, smirking up at the mocking scowl aimed his way. “And I know you left your lightsaber behind, it's all right you don't have to lie anymore Jack.”

“Admitting that I'm from the future used to be easier on the ego without all the pop culture references that have become easily available.”

“If I promise not to call you McFly, will you two stop nerding out when I'm sleeping! Look what you both did, I'm all awake now!” Cheyenne flops off of Ianto, rolling around on the unoccupied side of the bed, and flailing under the covers because there's nothing she hates more than waking up when she doesn't have to. The jostling wakes Indiana, who let's Ianto's slobber covered finger flop free and now that it's not at the mercy of the constant nursing vacuum he can feel every single one of the six deep teeth marks embedded in it.

“If you just go make my breakfast you can call me McFly all day long. I'm hungry! I've been trapped under the three of you for hours now.” Ianto wants to complain that it could hardly have been that long if Indy's curled in the bed with them, but since he doesn't particularly remember going to bed it's entirely possible that Indiana's been in bed with them all night. Left to his own devices, Jack prefers the baby in their bed for some reason.

“Dear god McFly, how are you the only thing standing between us and destruction for two hundred years and you can't make your own fucking breakfast! You're all going to starve to death without me this week.” Cheyenne's done wallowing and flailing across the bed apparently, crawling over Ianto and forcing herself into the tiny spot between himself and Jack. “Don't start, I'm going in a minute. Just French toast, or big-weekend-breakfast-huzzah!” Her arms barely miss Ianto's head as she throws them upwards.

“Cheyenne, I'm about a hundred and fifty years too old for that to be cute. Don't make me say it.”

“I'll say it for bacon Jack, I have very little shame. Big weekend breakfast Huzzah!” He even flails his arms along with hers. “You're so weird baby. Can I stop making big arms now?”

“Yes. Someone else can change Indy though, I have food to cook. And I have to pee, but in not that order.” She's scrambling over him _again_ because there's nothing alarming about the person scuttling over you having to pee, really go right ahead, disappearing into the bathroom.

“Right. I'm off to one of the other loos then.” Because even though the toilet is in it's own tiny room in the bathroom no one's allowed in once the door closes until the shower's running. “Come on you, come to daddy. We'll let the dogs out, change your bum and then everyone will have peed, yay!” Indiana squeals as he's slung up off of Jack, digging both his fists into his father's hair and meeting his kiss with a big open mouthed slobber. “No! Don't slobber on my lips lad, it's unattractive. Nice kisses with less spit, see?” Indy giggles, squirming in arm as Ianto presses noisy kisses up and down his face and around his head. “Dry kisses kid, _dry_!”

The dogs are waiting outside the door, following Ianto to the nursery at a brisk waddle as he deals with wetness and wrangling his offspring into the first of three to five outfits he'll wear today. The little red dinosaur on his long sleeved tee grins up at Ianto in a cheerful counterpoint to his son who starts bitching and fussing at him the second he plops that thick little body down into the cot and crosses the hall to the smaller of the guest baths and pushes the door almost shut. The cot sides begin to rattle violently and Ianto kicks the door to the bathroom back open, glaring around the doorjamb and into the nursery where Indiana is giving him the exact same look.

“Da! Dadadada no!”

“Yes! Daddy _shuts the door_ to pee, yes!”

“No!”

Daddy does not shut the door to pee. It isn't worth the fight. He does leave his hands cold and slightly damp, laughing at Indiana's squawk as he puts cold washed hands under the little shirt on his bare sides and lifts him up. The dogs, flanking either side of Indy's cot like Fu statues, take the stairs at a run and are vibrating in place as Ianto jogs up behind them and slings the kitchen door open onto a fantastic sunny day outside.

“Look at this. It's kind of warm out here.” The sun is fantastically bright, helping to make up for the chill in the air by shining down hard and warm on Ianto's bare arms. “We should spend the day out here. I think the grass is dry and everything.” The last of the obvious snow on the lawn melted last week, leaving the ground damp and pale green as the piles and drifts became just white shadows through the trees and out in the fields. “And if it's not, we'll just put on our manky clothes. We're gonna play outside today! Outside!” Indy shrieks gleefully as Ianto tosses him into the air and catches him. They didn't play outside much this winter, not when the snow was taller than the non-walker all season long, and he had no idea how much he wanted to get his kid and go running over all this green land that's been hiding in their backyard for months. “You are a lucky little man. I would have killed for a yard like this as a kid. We should find daddy's football. Watching you try and kick a football should be worth five or six good laughs, right?”

He leaves the dogs zooming around the grass and plops Indiana on the floor behind the baby gate that turned the sunny breakfast nook into what feels like their millionth baby safe spot. He flops onto his knees, crawling across the brightly colored mats to yank himself up on the edge of the benches and shuffle sideways around the perimeter until he can see out into the kitchen with one hand safely on the bench and the other shaking the hated gate.

“Hush. Bacon requires that you be confined, but mummy won't make me bacon if I don't make her coffee first and daddy requires that mummy make bacon because bacon is always better when someone else does the hard bit.”

“Very few truer words will ever be spoken in the history of the universe, so listen to your father.” Jack at breakfast has yet to lose its shine; watching the older man wander around barefooted in a pair of sweats so old Ianto's pretty sure they weren't originally white with his hair in his eyes instead of always put together for work or stripped down completely. Indy jerks both arms into the air imperiously, wobbling violently and completely confident that Jack's not going to let him tumble over backwards. “You're that sure I'm going to get you, huh?”

“Ja!” The trail of drool reaches Jack's face before the wide open mouth with its big sloppy kisses.

“We have got to stop picking you up on demand or you're going to be just as rotten and spoiled as your mother.”

“You adore us rotten and spoiled.” Chy must have ducked down the back stairs because she comes in through the family room, flicking on the stereo as she passes. “You can't imagine us being nearly as fantastic if we weren't. Gimmie my coffee and crate my progeny, it's breakfast time.”

This is the new normal and Ianto loves it.

**

“That must be the single most interesting bug in the history of bugs. Look at them.” No one is stupid enough to try and ask for, much less enforce a no work rule on their day off, and Ianto looks up from where he's skyping with Owen as Cheyenne jogs past into the house with the dogs at her heels, keeping a half eye on the rift readings running in half a dozen mini windows scattered around the main one where the doctor is trying to come up with some sort of theory about rift farts and strangely enough, _decreases_ in pediatric respiratory distress on the same nights.

“Hold on Owen.” Indy is sprawled on the blanket in the middle of the grass, Jack flopped next to him, tablet discarded on the blanket as unimportant as Indiana all but shoves his face in the dirt trying to get his eyes closer to whatever it is Jack's pointing to. “Jack, are the mole men rising?”

“Nope, but we have three pink earthworms all wiggling around at the same time.”

“Ah.” He shrugs at the screen. “Three pink Earthworms are apparently the coolest thing ever. Okay, it sounds like your big question is; is it an overall decrease regardless, or is it tied in with certain atmospheric injections, right? You're aware I'm probably the least qualified person on staff to be theoretically discussing this with.” Ianto has a running sticky note open on his screen because Owen doesn't seem to be making any notes at all, just paging back and forth between other windows and flipping through pages of printouts as he rambles. “Is this going to be your new personal project Owen, because if it is, you need to stop bothering me and start working on a funding proposal for Jack to pass along.”

“What's the point? My last three got shut down as soon as they left the Hub for lack of military application and they'll care exactly as much about easily breathing babies as they cared about curing blindness.”

“By irradiating rats in direct rift fallout.”

“Dammit, the rat could see at the end, possibly in more than three dimensions. Anyway doesn't matter, fuck it. I just needed someone to listen to how brilliant I am and you're the only sad sucker who answered the Skype.”

“Write it up anyway Owen. It'll give you something to do other than stare at me all day. Leave me alone, there are apparently still some interesting earthworms in the dirt that I think I'd rather look at.”

“I resent that. Know this.”

The worms are gone by the time Ianto flops onto the quilt next to Indiana, but there is a beetle of some kind that's yellow and trying to keep the chubby fist from closing deathly tight around it and shoving it in that pursed little mouth is a full time job that would have left no time for worm watching anyway.

“Owen thinks he's finding a correlation between rift farts and a drop in breathing issues in the under-five set but doesn't want to bother putting together a proposal that Downing St. will just ignore. I told him to do it anyway, mostly so he'd stop saying 'rift fart' at me on my day off.”

“I'll talk to him after this case, see if I've got any discretionary I can use to fund from in house for a while. Some of those atmospheric combinations can be recreated on Earth in controlled conditions, I'll let him distract himself with that for a while. He can cure asthma between apocalypses.”

“If Owen cures asthma we'll never hear the end of how fantastic he is. And we'll have to rightfully eat it too Jack. Every time he starts talking about how he's awesome, we will all be required to agree with him. No buddy, not in your mouth. Bugs are not for eating. Give Daddy the bug.”

“No!” The bug is most likely past tense now as Indy closes his hand around it and flings it off into the grass to keep Ianto from taking it away.

“See? Now we have no more bug.” Obviously he is lying, because Indiana gives him one of those so unimpressed looks from eyes that they've all decided just don't intend to change color from stormy blue-grey and starts studying his fat little hands looking for the bug he has most likely crushed and hurled to its doom. “Nope. All gone. Show Jack your distinct lack of bugs.”

“No?” He flops over onto his side and shoves his hands curiously in Jack's direction.

“Nope. And that's what spite gets you.” Jack wraps his hands around the baby, hefting him into the air and using him as a shade to keep the sun out of his face. “Remind me to dig out the last five years budgets, find out where we've been padding things to duck cuts and reallocate it, because a bored Owen is dangerous. Also, Gwen has too much free time. She's filling it with wedding stuff now, but she'll be done with that in a few months and I can't figure out what direction to point her in.”

“Keep her out of my archives Jack. It's been a year and I'm _still_ redoing 'A-E 1875-1900' on my down time. Put her in charge of the riftugees. She did fine with Emma, if a bit micro-managerial. Give her some broad coverage responsibility so she doesn't have time to nit-pick and I think you'll be impressed.”

“It runs too closely along with Flat Holm. I don't want the rest of them on the island Ianto.”

“So the first response stays a separate effort. Just give her the option Jack. Ask her for...I dunno, thirteen things that Torchwood can do to make the transitions for riftugees easier and let her go from there. She'll find something stupid we've been missing that will end up streamlining the entire process. Trust me, she got very good at that kind of stuff while you were gone.”

“I forgot what regular time away feels like.” There are places in Jack's hair that Ianto is pretty sure are going to go sandy blonde at the rate of actual sunshine they're soaking up. “The Cardiff branch used to run like this all the time you know. Three started out as research and first response center for the rift, left lots of really nice down time between emergencies.”

“Well, with proper scheduling anything can be run like a regular job. Even the Hub.” He pushes himself up to his feet, dusting grass out of the soft mesh of the long basketball shorts before lifting Indiana and listening to him shriek with laughter as Daddy slings him up into the air. “I'm going to try and teach my kid who can't always stand unassisted to kick a football. Should be funny. Want to help?”

“Spoken like a man who's never seen me with a football before. You want me to kick someone's teeth out through the back of their skull? No problem. Want me to kick a black and white ball into a net? No. Knock yourself out trying to teach your non-walker to play though, I'll be here if you need me.”

**

Ianto's sprawled out on his stomach, pretending to ignore Jack's fingers as they work their way down his spine towards the curve of his ass and his mouth nibbling at the curve of his lobe. Cheyenne disappeared into the house almost half an hour ago to put the baby down for a nap and mostly Ianto's just surprised Jack lasted this long.

“Pay attention to me. Come on,” He's torn between the urge to flop onto his back, sprawl wide, and beg for it like a slut, or to stay exactly where he is, minus an adjustment or two to get his weight off his swelling cock, and enjoy Jack trying to coax him into it. “Ianto, I'm _bored_ , let me spread you out and fuck you.” Obviously, coy is the way to be if it's got Jack curling closer to him, fingertips darting up under the hem of Ianto's shirt, stroking the skin there teasingly before slipping away again to tug at his clothes. “We won't even go upstairs. Right here, in the yard; let me see if that flush up your spine when I knock your knees apart and start licking looks the same in the daylight.”

“Jesus, Jack.” That's enough coy. Coy can absolutely get bent because now that Jack's talking about throwing Ianto's knees wide and working him mindless and ready on his tongue, sprawled and slutty is definitely the way to go. Ianto let's himself slump forward onto his folded arms, tipping his hips back enough for Jack to slip his hand between the cool tender grass and the flat of Ianto's stomach, carding his fingers down through the trail of hair arrowing down past the drawstring on his shorts.

“I want to watch you come on my fingers. As soon as you say you want me to. Which needs to be soon because I'm _bored_ Ianto.” He slings his legs wide, pressing up into the weight rocking down on him and tugging to pull him back harder into the cup of Jack's hips.

“Well, if you're _really_ that bored, I could probably take one for the team.” Ianto laughs as Jack makes a gleeful little noise against the nape of Ianto's neck, like he ever actually thought the answer would be no and yanks Ianto upright, manhandling him until he's flopped back in Jack's lap with legs sprawled wide. Jack's hands are huge on the inside of his thighs as they spread Ianto's legs wide enough that he has to use his shoulders against Jack's to brace his weight. He never really thought he was the kind of bloke who got off on that kind of thing, but the size of Jack, the way he moves Ianto around as easily as Ianto moves Chy has him squirming and letting himself unbalance just to feel the flex and play of muscle as he's put back exactly the way the older man wants him. The chill of the spring breeze nips across Ianto's flushed skin when he yanks his tee-shirt up over his head. He lets Jack yank it half way down his arms, restraining him in the tangle of stretched black cotton so that his arms are trapped behind himself. The way he's getting kissed, wet and messy as Jack wraps closer around him is kind of perfect as the hands on Ianto's thighs hitch higher, fingertips pressing along the crease of his groin and thumbs firmly tracing the hard line of his cock under the soft shifting black shorts. “Ah!”

“I love that noise. Make it again.”

Not only does he make the choked little gasp again for Jack, he makes an entire symphony of little mewls and whimpers that would be mortifying under any other circumstances before Jack finishes feeling him up and gets him positioned in an awkward sprawl with his weight resting on his shoulders and face pressed to the ground. It's a little uncomfortable and edging towards embarrassing when Jack tugs his shorts down and his shirt up just enough to frame how exposed Ianto actually is and then just sits back on his heels to admire the view.

“Jack, I swear if you've got the bloody record function on that wrist strap of yours running again...” Ianto thinks he deserves some sort of award for not swallowing his tongue when the immortal man starts laughing in that way that means 'of course I was making pornographic holograms of you, silly boy' and _keeps laughing_ as he leans forward and does this ridiculous complicated twisting thing with his tongue and the tender whorled pucker of Ianto's hole that has Ianto sinking his teeth into his lip and trying to arch backwards without falling over. It's slick and really fucking good, leaving him clenching his fists in the bunched fabric of his shirt as Jack begins a long fantastically torturous cycle of driving him fast and hard with fingers and his mouth to the gasping begging edge of coming and then easing him back down slowly to start over again.

By the time he comes hard enough to splatter up his own chest with three of Jack's wide fingers plunging fast and sloppy in and out of his ass, tongue flicking and tracing the tight stretched rim, Ianto's pretty sure he's agreed to do six different lewd acts in public and all the dishes for a week. He also thinks he might be working on his first sunburn of the year in the small of his back and the back of his neck, not that he cares when he's boneless with pleasure and only being held up by Jack's arm around his hips. He grins and lets himself hang limp and completely unhelpful in Jack's grip because he's sometimes a smug unhelpful brat like that when he gets off first, only to straighten up, looking over his shoulder as he feels a hot spurt hit the curve of his ass and run down to the small of his back.

“Really?” Apparently as Jack just huffs out a laugh and pushes Ianto back down flat so he can keep jerking off on his back.

“Yep.” He should get up, or at least fix his clothes so he's not sprawled around literally ass out, but Jack's kind of leaning on him, playing with the mess he's left on Ianto's skin in between pressing wet, panting kisses along the line of his spine. “My best idea all day.”

“I wouldn't admit it out loud if tossing off on someone's back was the best thing I'd managed to think of all day. Get off me before I end up with a sunburn on the top of my arse and have to steal hydrocortisone from Owen to deal with it.”

“I'll rub it in for you.”

“I'm going to have to edit this part out, obviously.” Attempting to whip around and track Cheyenne's voice is a very bad idea. Ianto over balances, falling face first into the grass with his arms still trapped behind his back by the shirt he was wearing and Jack's laughing entirely too hard to be of any help other than yanking his shorts mostly back in the right position and toppling him over completely so that he's glaring up through the sunshine at Cheyenne. She's leaning over the railing of the bedroom balcony, grinning widely as she moves six feet to the left to get a better angle with the camera in her hand.

“Cheyenne!”

“It's to keep me company those long lonely nights at sea!” She disappears back into the house, giggling loudly enough that Ianto can hear it trailing off as she runs for where ever she intends to hide the SD card.

“She's ridiculous. Long lonely...how'd you twist my shirt Jack, Christ. Get me unstuck so I can go get that bloody camera away from her before it ends up on her cloud server and I can't ever get rid of it.” Jack's laughing at him, but he also helps him back into his clothes correctly. “You know, for someone who never wanted to do porn, there is entirely too much footage of me shagging floating around the world.”

“It's hardly floating around. I can personally account for at least sixty hours of it.”

“See, that? I there shouldn't be sixty hours of footage of me having sex.” He pushes up to his feet, dusting himself down and grimacing as entirely too much of his clothing slides through and sticks to various globs of come on his skin. “It's not even worth the fight. She's already got it saved and sitting on a cloud server somewhere. I need a bloody shower.” He stomps to the French-door in a huff and makes it exactly two steps from the doors before turning around. “Sixty? _Really_?”

“And that's just mine.”

**

They're sat down to dinner and Ianto's trying to keep his eyes off the clock counting down the increasingly short hours until Cheyenne sails off on a boat with almost three hundred civilians and just over two hundred crew members, one of which is an alien arms dealer, with only Owen for backup when the doorbell rings.

“Are we expecting company?” Jack doesn't bother waiting to see if either of them answer, sliding out of his chair and disappearing into the front half of the house before anyone else can get up.

“He has got to calm down about people at the door Ianto. It winds the dogs up and then I've got all three of them death staring at some poor girl scout or pizza guy. He's armed at the dinner table again, like one day it's going to be the Bond bad guys with a bomb.”

“In Jack's defense, if anyone would ever get a bomb brought to their house by a delivery guy, Jack would be that one unfortunate bastard.”

“Actually, I've _had_ a bomb sent to my house. Twice. But not since the sixties. This, however, is not a bomb and it's not for me. You could fit a couple really good sized ones in here though, Jesus, Gwen.” Jack's awkwardly juggling three large bundles of flowers, ferns flopping into his face as he paws through the God-awful combination of sunflowers, green orchids, and strange tiedyed roses. “These are ugly. Really, _really_ ugly and I hope to God you picked these Indiana because if Gwen did this I am going to have to give her enough of a raise to hire a wedding planner before she can put her own flower order in.”

“Mamamaam!” Peas hit the floor under the table with a mushy sort of patter as Indiana reaches for Jack's armful, and Jack slides around to the other side of the island as the dogs come running through the house to get to the round green bounty under the highchair.

“They're not ugly, they're awesome! Mommy _loves_ them fatty!” She springs out of her chair, wiggling Indiana out of his seat even though he's barely eaten and the dogs are underfoot slobbering on the floor trying to lick up his veg.

“Cheyenne, stop calling him fatty.” Ianto is not getting up from the table. Not when the immediate area around the table is a swirl of motion as Indy flails, Cheyenne all but climbs Jack trying to dig around for a card, and Jack's encouraging it, laughing and shuffling the unfortunate greenery choices any time she almost has it.

“He's _huge_. Owen said he's officially height weight proportionate for someone twice his age. He's my chunky little monster! Yes he is! He's my mongor little beastie who is going to be bigger than mommy before middle school! My fatty fatty fatty! You just hate it because you were the _cutest_ , fattest baby I have ever seen a picture of in my _life_ Ianto.” He freezes, fork full of stroganoff half way to his mouth because the world is a cruel place.

“You lie.”

“Your sister is awesome. You looked like a very happy, very short Stay-Puffed marshmallow man. Seriously Jack, he was soooo round and his eyes were _huge_. It's frightening how much Indy looks just like him.”

“Alright,” He lets the fork hit the plate with a clatter, stepping over dogs to pluck his squirming son out of Cheyenne's arms and twisting his head away from the sunflower that stays clenched in a fist almost too small to go around the stem. “Come here you, we don't have to put up with this abuse. Jack, stop making that face because you will never ever see that picture. I may set my sisters flat on fire actually, to destroy all the evidence that I did not spring forth fully grown and just move her into a new one. If I make it look like aliens did it, I can use the expense account to pay for it.”

“Please don't set the entire hood on fire just so no one can see what a really fantastically adorable baby you were. Also, give me back _my_ baby, he was showing me the very pretty flowers he picked out for his mommy!”

“Chy these are,” he pauses and wraps his hands over Indiana's ears. “These are hideous. You're not going to be the one looking at them for a week.”

“Oh my god, did you just cover his ears? He can't...Ianto he doesn't know that you're saying he has bad taste. He's nine months old darlin’, he doesn't have any taste at all. Quite frankly I'm not sure if kids his age can even see a full range of color. I think I heard somewhere he can only see red, green, blue, and purple but that might be dogs.”

“That's definitely dogs Cheyenne! I think. I'm pretty sure..now you've got me thinking that rubbish! Christ woman, I'm going to have to find some way to ask Owen without sounding like an idiot.”

“ _Anyway_ , they're beautiful because my baby picked them out, hopefully all by himself. Besides, the orchids will look fantastic, alone, in our room. Stick 'em in that glass block vase on the little table between my chair and the balcony.” Her chair, which is actually Jack's monstrously old wing back chair with the well broken in leather and the still brilliant brass studs, lugged up from one of the largest secure storage rooms that seemed to contain approximately three houses worth of furniture. “Sunflowers always look good in a kitchen, and these very... _interesting_ roses can go on mommy's desk at work!” Where no one will have to look at the strange, almost florescent blues, yellows, pinks and purples dyed into the once white roses.

“Well, if you're just going to banish them to die alone in your office, they can sit, all tacky and obnoxious, in _my_ office where everyone can admire Gwen's tragic lack of editing skills. Also, I'm kind of alarmed at how well Gwen forges my name. Look at this, it's pretty close to perfect.” Ianto doesn't need to see the mostly perfect copy of Jack's slanted copperplate script; he was impressed enough the first time Gwen shoved a page under his nose with her forgery on it and asked if it would pass until Jack got back. Chy, however, has never seen it and gives the awful card with the sad teddy bear on it a long appraising look.

“Crazy man. That looks just like yours! Was she that good before you left?”

“No idea. So here's your forged card.” The corner of his mouth quirks upwards. “Apparently we'll miss you 'bear-y much'.”

“I won't.” Ianto can't help himself. “That's a lie. I miss _no one_ 'bear-y much', thanks anyway.”

“Well, apparently you do. I bet your biggest regret today is that you only get to make one disgustingly saccharine bear pun at me before I go.” She rocks up on her toes to press her lips to the bottom of Ianto's jaw before taking the mass of flowers in her arms. The flora looks even more ridiculous half swamping her the way it does. “Damn. I'm going to find some way to turn this mess into something kind of attractive and I think I'll call Gwen and clown her about her taste and strange sense of humor the entire time I do. There are replacement peas for him on the stove, see if he'll eat a little more for you please?”

**

The alarm goes off at three am and even Jack rolls out of bed with a silently exhausted glower aimed at the clock. Cheyenne is foregoing both her occasional early morning pseudo-hysterics, and her normally obnoxious high strung cheer, sliding off the bed and zombie shuffling towards the closet. Their luggage and everything she and Owen will need for boarding, including the clothes they'll be wearing onto the boat, are waiting at the Hub and Cheyenne stumbles back out of the closet less than a minute later in Jack's gray sweater, the sleeves swamping her hands and the hem swinging around her bare knees.

“You're still half naked cariad.” He pats her on the head as he squeezes by and grabs one of the suits he keeps pressed and ready with a shirt and tie in several garment bags by the door.

“Jammies.” The hem is yanked up around her waist, flashing a glimpse of tiny hot pink shorts. “Ain't dressin at three in the fuckin mornin to get dressed 'gain in a coupla hours.”

Ianto doesn't bother making coffee at home, isn't awake enough to even try. Instead, he makes sure no one forgets the diaper bag he packed last night, makes sure the dogs are put out into the back, and doesn't complain about Cheyenne being in the way as she climbs into the back seat, curls up next to Indiana's car seat under a blanket she drug out of the house behind her, and makes it half impossible to finish buckling him in. Jack has a fist up to throw for it and Ianto ignore him and crawls smugly into the passengers’ side because Ianto drives home and Jack drives there and right now it's pretty fucking sweet to be Ianto. He lets himself ignore the cold air coming in through Jack's open window and spends exactly thirty seconds wishing he was in the back seat too when he sees Chy un-cocoon herself enough to tuck the blanket around Indy also before drifting back off to sleep.

He never really makes it past a light doze and comes awake and alert on instinct as he recognizes the sound of the tires on the grooved pavement and the flashing pattern of the lights when they enter the garage. The baby, thankfully, sleeps just as deeply being carried up through the Hub to Jack's office as he did being transferred from cot to car seat half an hour ago. The plan, and it's elegant in its simplicity, is for Jack to start setting up while Ianto makes his strongest coffee, and Cheyenne and Indy can get some more sleep on the pull out next to Owen until everyone else has arrived and they're ready to start outfitting. It's an awesome plan with the only flaw being that they forgot to account for Owen and the possibility that he may be sleeping like an asshole.

He's sprawled diagonally across the sleeper sofa upside down, one foot propped up on the arm of the couch and hair flopped in his face as he snores. Cheyenne growls from under the makeshift hood of the blanket wrapped around her and clambers onto the sleeper anyway in the only corner Owen's not occupying, curling herself up under her blanket and lifting the corner of the blanket enough to let Jack slide Indy into the small space between herself and the arm of the couch.

The smell of brewing beans curls behind Ianto's eyes, driving out the faint throbbing that might have been a headache half an hour from now and he reminds himself that he, Tosh, and Gwen will each have time down to crash later today unlike Chy and Owen getting an extra forty minutes in now and that's it. The screen of his phone blurs every third blink as Ianto sends a text to both the girls, reminding them to park in the loading bay so that the airlock doesn't wake anyone when they come in, and he drinks the first cup scalding hot, slumped against the counter in wrinkled black chinos and a shirt that he obviously plucked from the wrong drawer because he's just now noticing it has writing on it. He chugs the molten liquid as fast as his mouth will let him and plucks the shirts far enough away from himself to read it. He blinks twice because he doesn't remember ever owning a shirt with this slogan before snagging Jack's mug and taking it out to the floor.

“Jack, any reason you let me walk out of the house this morning in a shirt that says 'Dick like Jesus'?”

“Because I thought I'd spread the good word?” He turns away from setting up mainframe to run a twenty-four hour monitoring and takes his coffee from Ianto, grinning at the rumpled unimpressed look on the younger man. “Huh, it actually says 'Dick like Jesus', I thought you were taking the piss. Reading your shirt was the last thing on my mind this morning. That said, hilarious. You should go hop in the shower before anyone else sees that, otherwise I feel compelled to make every half funny joke about feeding the masses I can come up with at half three in the morning.”

The shower finishes the job the coffee started, slightly cool water shocking him the rest of the way into wakefulness and pebbling his skin up tight as he slicks back his hair and waits for the hot water to finish working its way up through the turn of the century copper plumbing. Mornings like this Ianto fantasizes about kidnapping an entire contracting team of plumbers and holding them captive until all the plumbing has been brought up to the standard of the restrooms on the first three levels of the Hub. By the time he stands in front of the wall length mirror over the bank of sinks, straightening his tie, Ianto is wide awake and has managed to stuff the shaky, angry part of him that still thinks this is a piss-poor idea down underneath the rest of him that's ready to do his job and get this done with.

Gwen and Tosh are already in by the time he makes it back up to the main level. Tosh is perched on the edge of the desk closest to Jack, glasses sliding down the bridge of her nose, dressed in what Ianto's come to think of as her early morning stakeout outfit. The ankle length skirt is warm to the touch and wine red, the sweater over it a threadbare once white that belonged to someone obviously not good enough for Toshiko anyway. Her hair is yanked back out of her face in two messy pigtails, one of which Jack keeps tugging every time he walks by. She's sipping her coffee slowly, and if she doesn't look anymore awake than Ianto was fifteen minutes ago, she's doing better than Gwen.

“Pajamas Gwen?” The woman scowls at him through the steam curling up around her face and the rats nest of hair that's flopped around her head and down over one eye.

“Right here mate.” She yanks on the hem of the bright yellow shirt falling around her knees, stretching it out until he can see the tall thin grey alien on the front, face screwed up into the same sleepy grimace Gwen's sporting, with a mug in its own three fingered hand as it makes a rude gesture with the other hand. There's wrinkled, illegible blocks of black that are probably text when straightened out running alongside the cartoon figure. He laughs despite himself.

“Those are from Rhys I take it?”

“Gotta love a man who's response to finding out I catch aliens is to buy me tacky things with aliens on them every time we're fighting. Look at the shorts.” They're the same yellow as the shirt, printed with huge cartoon flying saucers. “I'll be very ashamed of myself for coming in wearing them in a couple hours.” She shrugs and yawns wide enough that Ianto can see the back of her molars. “Right now, you should all just be really glad I remembered to put a bra on.”

“Gwen, no one is ever happy when a woman puts on a bra. Ow!” Jack hops back from the foot that lashed out at him, pouting as he rubs the line of his shin. “One of these days I'm going to fire you for kicking me.”

“Make it today so I can go back to bed or shut your cake hole until I can open my eyes all the way.”

Setting up alone takes an hour. Ianto has a checklist done up on his iphone of everything they'll have to do in order with side lists of what they need in each section. He can see Gwen wanting to take the piss every time he ticks off another box, but no one's going to waste fifteen minutes looking for the double sided skin tape later.

It's ten minutes to five when Ianto carries two mugs of coffee up the stairs, letting himself into Jack's office. Cheyenne and Owen are sprawled across each other, her legs tossed over his waist and his head dangling over the side to get away from her feet.

“Doctors Morgan and Harper, coffee is on the desk. Don't kick each other in the head and no one wake my offspring please.” He's surprised by how soon they start moving, grumbling under their breaths as stretches are interrupted by thumping into other, unfamiliar bodies. Owen cracks his eyes first, grinding the heel of his palm into the side of his face as he looks down at the leg resting heavily over his waist and following it up to the body attached. He doesn't even look surprised, twisting his head around until he sees Ianto leaning against the desk sipping from his own mug and gives him a sleepy grin that would probably be pretty spectacular if none of them knew Jack.

“This is _exactly_ what it looks like.”

“No it isn't you idiot. Get moving, we need you both out of the shower, dry, and in your pants by half past so we can start with the trackers and go from there. Chy, baby come on, let's go.” He snags her mug, taking it to the couch and waving it in the air over her head. “Showtime.”

“Appealing to my narcissistic need to be the star of every moment is cheating.” Her words are muffled by the cocoon of blankets and she makes a breathing hole, sticking one slender arm out imperiously. “Coffee me.”

“Sit up and coffee yourself. You both now have half an hour to have coffee, shower, dry, and dress in underthings only, the least amount you're comfortable with please. Chy, nothing with an underwire. When you get out of the showers instead of going left back to the locker rooms, go right around that corner and down that little hall to the room at the end. It's a surgical mini-bay and we'll be inserting your trackers there. I swear Cheyenne, it doesn't hurt, doesn't even leave a mark.”

It takes Chy and Owen five more minutes to wander tiredly from the office, mugs clutched tightly as they stumble down towards the locker room. Ianto detours through the galley to get three travel thermoses and takes the service corridors down to the creepy mint tiled room with its unsettlingly large drain in the center.

“I hate this room Jack. Every time I'm in here feels like a scene from Silent Hill waiting to happen.”

“Well, just don't shoot Owen and Chy. They aren't zombies, just kinda sleepy.” Ianto snorts, setting the two smaller silver thermoses down and unscrewing the lid on the large black one, topping off Jack's mug.

“Zombies are Resident Evil Jack.” The immortal man scoffs and Ianto laughs, squirming away as he's snagged by the back of the jacket and tugged close enough that Jack's nibbling at his ear.

“I don't care, because either way, you spend two hours killing pretend monsters while I watch.”

“You love it. You wouldn't keep watching if you didn't think 'Ianto Jones, zombie slayer' was the hot.”

The locker rooms are really nothing more than a big wet echo chamber and the sound of water being turned off is as loud as the crash of it pouring out against the tiles was. Owen comes down the hallway in grey boxer briefs, still drying his hair with the towel tossed across his head. He leans forward, checking the settings on the monitoring equipment and just like every time he sees it, the tiny jet black snake twisted alone and expressionless around a gnarled grey branch inked into the pale skin between the wings of Owen's shoulder blades takes Ianto by surprise.

“You know, all I heard growing up was what a horrid idea tattoos was and how having one made you a hoodlum who'd never have a job doing better than making chips, and yet most the people I know with them have doctorates. I kind of feel like my nana lied to me.” 

“You whine about it, but you've yet to grow a pair and do something about it. You could get a pretty little butterfly on your ankle and a tramp stamp to match Cheyenne's.”

“I hate you. Keep antagonizing the man who's about to be sticking a honking great metal straw halfway up your spine.”

“You had better be lying about a huge metal straw Ianto Jones. I won't even address the spine thing, because that was obviously horseshit.” Cheyenne is standing in the doorway of the room, holding a towel around her. “All my bras have underwire, by the way.”

“That's fine. Come on, you're going first, because if you watch it happen to Owen first, you won't believe me when I tell you it doesn't hurt and doesn't leave a mark.” She grimaces, tugging backwards as he takes her hand.

“That is not fucking reassuring.”

“I've had it done, you don't feel a thing. Look, it's really fast, lay flat on the table and you're up again in two minutes.” He tucks her under his arm, leading her over to the table, and because his mam didn't raise a fool, Ianto doesn't mention that they will be restraining her. Instead, he lifts her onto the table so she doesn't lose her grip on her towel and has a sheet ready to spread over her hips when she flips hesitantly onto her stomach at Jack's twirled fingers. Ianto kicks the rolling stool around to the front of the table and settles on it, reaching up and grabbing her by the wrist as Jack fastens the wide padded leather belt low across her hips.

“Gentlemen, I have seen this porno and I'm going to have to decline, thank you.” She starts bucking her hips trying to get out and Ianto leans forward, pressing his forehead to hers and lowering his voice.

“Cheyenne, stop. You're fine. It's just to make sure you don't twitch. You need to hold still Chy.” Jack's already got his rubber gloves on, slathering the thick numbing cream in a straight line down her spine and stepping neatly to the side as she tries to kick out at him. “Stop it or you're going in a five point and you and I both know you'll really freak then.” She's already numbed to the bone, doesn't flinch as Jack touches her once or twitch when he takes a lancet from Owen and jabs her with the tiny needle. “Look, the tracers themselves are impossibly tiny. Nanobots, actually, that are going to be transmitting a very particular alien algorithm that's unique not just to Torchwood, but specifically the Hub.” He cuts his eyes over her shoulder and keeps his face perfectly blank as Jack fishes the delivery system out of the stasis fluid.

The injection system looks like nothing so much as eighteen not-quite-chrome inches of faceless mechanical centipede. Ianto looks away, resting his forehead back against hers as Jack begins powering it up, because he's never been able to make any expression other than awed revulsion as it begins to move, segments expanding and contracting as Jack runs the 'head' along the length of her spine before settling it on its three dozen small legs and it adjusts and aligns itself to fit exactly from the nape of her neck to the curve at the small of her back. He doesn't look when he hears the rapid series of clicks that is the machine firing three dozen hair thin flexible needles into her spine and injecting millions of nanites into her.

“What was that?”

“What was what?” the needles all withdraw and the thing hangs limp and lifeless again in Jack's hands. “That clicking? That was the trackers being injected. You're done. Get up, we've got to get Owen done and we scheduled in time for you to have a fit, but you're pushing the limits of that, and I can't have you mucking up my schedule on a busy day Chy.”

“Okay, first don't schedule in time for me to have a hissy fit. I didn't have a hissy fit. I had a pretty reasonable reaction to being _belted to a table_ without warning so I could get shot full of alien shit! You people are all insane, but I promise, that was a really mild version of a normal reaction to that scenario.” She swings her legs off the table, clutching her towel around her as Ianto lifts her back down to the ground before wrapping it back around completely. “Secondly, you're right, it was fine, I never felt a thing so what was so scary looking you had to sneak belt me to the table?”

This is not Owen's first time being tracked. It's not even his fifth and he hasn't bothered to lie flat, leaning across the table on his elbows while Jack numbs him up with one hand and scans the injection system down the length of the doctor's spine just above his fingertips. Cheyenne turns around, arms crossed and Ianto is expecting some flailing, perhaps a truly unfortunate shriek to echo off the mint tiles but it moves, clicking and writhing in Jack's grasp as it extends the 'legs' and begins to resize itself, and she doesn't make a sound when her eyes roll up into her head and she drops to the floor like a sack of potatoes faster than he can move to catch her.

“I'm telling her you just watched her hit the floor when she wakes up.”

“Shut up Owen.”

**

There's no hitch to the rest of the morning and Ianto knows he should be grateful that everything is going smoothly, but he's starting to get painfully anxious as everything continues to go exactly as it should. The nauseous churning that started up after his fifth oversized mug in four hours has started the slow slide that will end up with him eating T-3's like candy as his stomach does its very best to make him regret every moment he spends upright and doing anything but panting shallowly through his teeth. Already the back of his mouth is sour and he jogs down to the med bay, digging his chalky fake mint suspension out of the back of the fridge and shaking it as hard as he can, ignoring the note Owen has written on the plain white bottle to take according to dosing instructions and tipping the entire thing up to his mouth, forcing two big swallows down even as he shudders in disgust.

“Ianto?” Gwen is leaning over the railing , frowning at him from the second step from the bottom as he wipes the corner of his mouth. “You have got to stop drinking that from the bottle.”

“Measuring is for people whose guts don't actively bleed Gwen. Is Indy awake?” He can't think of any other reason for her to have come looking for him since he's fine for assisting Tosh with set up and calibration, but Jack is the one who has to do all final installs and checks and that's the part they're down to.

“No, but um,” She drops her voice, leaning further over the rails. “Cheyenne is in the loo breathing in a bag.”

Of course she is.

Tosh is leaning against the doorjamb to the ladies room, working busily on her tablet as she tries to quietly coax the other woman to open the door. She gives him a sympathetic look as he comes over, already fishing the keys out of his pocket.

“She locked it?”

“After the second time Gwen went in.” The key ring is loud, flipping through the heavy weight clip holding the thirty or so keys associated with the tourist office, restrooms, storage closets, utility rooms, and vehicles at Torchwood. The ladies rooms on the first three levels are all one key, and Jack can laugh at Ianto's keys all he wants, but the immortal man would be here at least five minutes trying various identical unmarked keys while Ianto merely finds the key whose head has been replaced by a grinning skull with a pink bow on its enameled dome and lets himself in, pushing the door shut behind himself as he enters.

Cheyenne is perched on the counter, eyes huge over the little rapidly expanding and contracting black vinyl bag she's holding pressed to her pale face.

“Really Chy?” The corner of his mouth quirks up against his will as she nods franticly without ever taking the bag away. “We don't have time for this, you know that right?” He's hardly holding out hope that she'll take the bag away from her face and get over it that easily, but she doesn't even make a bad gasping attempt to talk, yanking her phone out of her bra and typing creepily fast for someone using only one thumb.

_::do you have any idea what 87 million dollars actually looks like? it looks like the tp order, but made of money::_

“This is about that deal _again_?”

_::YES i do this every time. hysterical=now >hysterical=later::_

“I'm not going to stand here and text with you Chy, you're a foot away from me.”

 _::breathing into a bag=too busy to talk::_ And too busy to text apparently because she sets her phone down roughly, ignoring its noisy clattering slide into the sink to starts shaking her free hand, flicking it sharp and fast enough that Ianto's not quite sure she won't injure herself.

“Okay, scoot over.” The counter is cool through his trousers as Ianto squeezes onto the vanity, ignoring the fact that he has half a cheek in the sink and wrapping his arm around her, tugging her close enough to grab the flailing hand and firmly put it down in her lap. She tries to fight him for her little vinyl bag and loses easily, because she's sickly pale, lips beginning to change color. “Cariad, you have got to calm down, because if Owen has to put a mask on you before you even leave the Hub, they will scratch the entire operation due to an unfit agent.” Her eyes narrow and a hint of color comes back as she flushes angrily.

“Not.”

“Shh. I know you're not, but it's regs and Owen is very serious about his job, all evidence to the contrary. Come on, deep breaths before Jack comes looking for you to get your contacts in.”

“In.” He cups her chin, tilting her face up and when she looks off to the left he can just barely see the edge of the contacts.

“Good. How are you more frightened of doing something you do every day then you are of going on an I&A without access to proper backup?”

“Never fucked up an alien hunt before.” Her words are breathy, forced out between gasps as they are, but she's breathing regularly enough to attempt it and Ianto will take that as a win. “Fucked up a merger before. Really bad at failing. Don't take it well.”

“You'll do fine. Come on, splash some water on your face and let's go.” The look she gives him is scandalized.

“I _just_ did my makeup.”

“There's my girl. We're forty-three minutes till the two of you leave and counting Dr. Morgan. Our UNIT liaison has already called to let us know their man has finished installing the equipment. We have eyes and ears on every level. We're just waiting on you baby.”

“Okay then.” She takes a couple long shuddery breaths before hopping down onto insanely tall heels that bring her eyes to the level of his mouth when he joins her on the floor. “I'm over it. I'm cool. Let's go.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Authors note; It almost got me. This one story almost ran me away from writing. I don't think I've ever had a piece of writing frustrate me to this extent and I just want to send an enormous thank you to my beta czarina_kitty who went above and beyond the call of duty as far hand-holding went, saying fantastic encouraging things when I just wanted to say 'and then they caught the bad guy the end'. Also, thank you, ladies and gentlemen for your patience and encouragement. Some of you were so nice when I was running around online freaking out and I really do appreciate it.
> 
> P.S. if you don't follow either of my journals 'Arnica' at either livejournal or dreamwidth then you didn't get the announcement. The entire piece is finished and going up in a mass posting today. Also, you should totally hit my journals since they get all the bonus stuff like cut scenes, maps, floor plans, and random porn that doesn't go up here on AO3

Cheyenne pauses on the gangplank, sweeping her eyes from the stern of the ship up to the bow as she pushes her shades up onto the top of her head. The day is clear and sunny in London and the woman pans her gaze along the busy docks and back to the five hundred foot ship bobbing gently on the waves as it towers over them at a respectable nine decks in height.

“Awww, it's  _ cute _ Owen! Like the little yacht that could.” Across the hood Owen steps out, letting his own sunglasses dangle carelessly from the pocket of his pale grey blazer as he does the same long visual sweep, hitching his thumbs in the pockets of his dark wash D2 jeans.

“It's alright.” Cheyenne rolls her eyes, ignoring the valet to saunter around the back of the car and the porters waiting there, unlocking the trunk on her way around to where Owen's yanking out garment bags and shoving them in the direction of the second porter. “Not those ones mate, I've got those myself.” The kid pauses in the act of reaching for the lead lined leather suitcases, looking embarrassed as he straightens up sharply, tugging at his uniform jacket before taking the several long black and white bags carefully over his arm.

“Why'd you have to snap at him Owen, the poor darling's  _ embarrassed _ now.” The medic rolls his eyes, swaying with the movement as Cheyenne shoves him lightly before gathering up the two large suitcases at his feet. “I'm sorry sweetheart, I know they sent extra porters because of last time, but I swear I have learned my lesson and had the bulk of the luggage picked up last night and checked in this morning.”

“Last time?”

:: _ last time?:: _

She doesn't startles as the words scroll across the bottom of her vision, but Owen smirks in amusement as she clears her throat.

“Yeah, um, Jamie and I. We almost missed embarkation and then held the disembarkation up later unloading my awful over packing. Anyone who thinks I'm a tragically spoiled shopaholic now, should have seen me at nineteen and twenty. So...” she pauses, running her hands briskly along the lines of her body. “Wait, do I have the tickets or do you?”

“ _ I _ do. You gave them to me back in Cardiff because apparently every time you travel you make it to the gates and panic because you don't remember where you put the tickets.” She leans into Owen as he slings his arm around her.

“Oh yeah. Well, give the boarding papers back now. Be gentle with the car  please, dear  heart. It's my baby.” Cheyenne lets the keys dangle carelessly off the tips of her fingers towards the young woman in the black jacket, slipping her fingers in the crook of Owen's arm and tugging him towards the gang plank even as she reaches into his jacket, plucking the leather ticket folder from the inner pocket. “Come  _ on _ Owen! I want to be settled in the cabin with at least one strong drink under my belt before your mother boards and she's coming. I can feel the evil on the wind.”

“They're right, you're absolutely insane.”

Boarding is quick and if Owen's first impulse is to roll his eyes at the white gloved figure in the black suit who appears at their side with two flutes of champagne to escort them to their suite, it's all he indulges in, letting Cheyenne sip at the glass in her hand, holding his by the stem and  passing her purse and jacket to the man when he offers to carry their belongings. Owen ignores his offer, and the butler folds her jacket over his arm so that it doesn't wrinkle and leads the way from the gleaming copper and wood reception area on deck six up towards the suites on deck seven. Cheyenne listens attentively as he points out where everything on ship in, making sure to take a good long look at everything in case there are changes from the interactive maps the team spent days memorizing. It's not her first time on one of the Silver Sea ships, but she's never been on the smallest of the fleet before and it's a stunning piece of craftsmanship. Owen doesn't seem to be enjoying any of it, although the way his eyes keep looking down and towards the right make Chy think he's getting a lot of communications with the Hub that she isn't right now.

Suite seven oh one is one of two Grand suites, occupying the fore portion of deck seven. Cheyenne lets the older pale blond man who will be their personal butler for the voyage unlock the door and follows him inside, letting her gaze take in the warm cream color of the large room.

“This is nice. Right, you're with me darling, we'll get all the little details sorted out and let Owen fight with the laptop. I hate fighting with my 4G lines, it seems like every time I get my wireless printer online, I knock my iPad off. Does that ever happen to you?”

It takes almost forty minutes to get amenities sorted out and to supervise the unpacking while Owen sweeps the rest of the cabin for bugs of Earthly or alien in origin and wires the room for surveillance with their own equipment. Cheyenne watches the black suited figure slip out of the door and shakes her head with a sigh, walking over to the second still closed suitcase and pressing her finger to the scanner lock. The latches pop open with an audible click and Cheyenne plucks Owen's rear draw holster from where Ianto had it folded as small as possible with her own, dropping it on the table next to where the doctor is jacking his Torchwood line into the mini router Toshiko rigged out of a mobile hot spot.

“Take enough time in there?” The medic has his jacket tossed over the arm of the couch, frowning down at where Cheyenne's laying out weapons and turning on pieces of equipment one at a time to test them.

“Kiss my ass Owen. Don't tell me it took you less than half an hour to sweep this room, because if it did, you did it wrong. Anyway, you got a hypoallergenic down pillow, and the firm therapeutic kind out of the wait since I have no idea what kind of fucking pillows you sleep with. Also, our entire wardrobe is unpacked, I kept Tryveg, our butler for the duration, from spritzing orange blossom scented  _ anything _ near our belongings, confirmed our reservation at the officers table tonight  _ and _ I made sure our reservations for La Champagne is for tomorrow since your mother has apparently booked there tonight which should ensure us two evenings of work out of Myrna's fucking way. The fact that I did it all in less than an hour is a testament to my awesomeness. It was such good work that I ate your Marcolini's along with mine.”

“I swear to God, if you ate my chocolate on this shit day, I will toss you over board while we're close enough to land for you to swim in and do the case myself.” The return taunt dies on Cheyenne's lips as she looks up at Owen, face pinched with frustration as he types too hard, fingers striking the keyboard with an audible clacking as he tries to sync all their equipment to Mainframe and the bugs UNIT installed for them so the Hub has a constant live stream of information.

“No, I didn't actually eat your chocolate. I even left you the raspberry filled since you were doing all the hard work...are you okay Owen? Because you're kind of looking like you're thirty seconds from losing your cool.”

“Even if I were the type to have deep soul searching conversations, and I'm not, I wouldn't have it when we're both wired and everyone's watching the Harper and Morgan show live.” She snorts, shaking her head and going back to making sure scanners are still calibrated and functioning.

“There is no place in all of time and space where you get top billing over me. None.”

“Hey, I'm two months older than you, had my doctorate longer, and been employed by Torchwood almost four years in a job where you're eligible to retire on full pension and retcon after seven.”

“And yet the facts don't change.” Her nose wrinkles as Cheyenne smirks at him, dusting her knees off as she stands from her crouch, small square case in her hands. Inside are fifty small round bits of metal roughly the size of a watch battery. “So anyway, micro disruptors. Now, when Jack says it's going to cause a 'brief interference' with Leviski's destabilization, did he mean like, we'd see some subtle change, like eye colors flickering, or is this punk's entire face going to melt and cause a panic or what?”

“I...probably should have asked that before we left. Hey, did you all fuck off for lunch and leave the monitors running themselves? We're not just pondering among ourselves here. What are we looking at in terms of disruption here?”

_ ::sry, wvl fight in cells. Jack will brb:: _

“Well, I'm going to get changed while Jack's breaking up another death match between the little ones over grapes.” They've only been the stressed out caretakers of two juvenile weevils for a week and a half now and Cheyenne's not sure about Jack, but she knows for a fact that the rest of them are unsure about his plan to rehab the offspring of man eaters and reintroduce them into a human shy colony. Particularly when they keep trying to maul each other, sending Janet into self-harming hysterics in the cell across from them trying to get to them. Ianto's been trying to get Jack to put them all together in the hopes that the old female can, if not help train them, at least control them and Jack's nervous that she'll eat them. “Do you need an assist with getting the network up or anything out of the bedroom before I duck in there?”

“Yeah, throw me out my chocolate.”

**

Jack still hasn't answered their question by the time she and Owen make their way up to deck eight arm in arm. He hasn't bothered changing out of the clothes he traveled here in, merely stepping into the bedroom long enough to put his gun on before slinging his jacket back over his shoulders to cover it. Cheyenne struts along at his side, almost as tall as he is in vividly fuchsia wedge sandals she's paired with short matte black leather shorts and a crisp white linen jacket with sculptural black lace insets on the sides and elbows. They've barely been on deck eight minutes, sauntering leisurely towards the pool bar heads bent close together under the brim of her oversized fedora styled white sunhat with the black trim as eyes follow them across the deck.

“This is the stupidest hat I have ever seen.”

“This hat is  _ it _ Owen. You have no idea how pissed at least four girls out here are that I just came out in this foolishly big hat. They're  _ so _ mad they don't look half as good as me in their own substantially smaller hats and everyone is driving themselves crazy trying to figure out who I'm with.”

_ ::according 2 the lipreading program, the group of women on Chy's 8 think u may b a foreign rock star because they can't decide why else u look kind of familiar:: _

“I don't know why Tosh told you that. It's going to go to your head having stupid little girls thinking you're a rock star.”

“Says the girl with the ego so big you need an eight and a half inch brim to shade it.” She lets herself laugh exactly as hard as she wants to, swaying into Owen flirtatiously.

“Oh Owen, you are almost funny. I'm glad we're here, I think we might actually have fun when we're not busy working.” The Pool Bar and Grill is already lightly populated with early lunchers watching the English shoreline begin to recede, couples and groups are scattered across the deck, sipping their drinks and keeping their peripherals on the empty table closest to the center of the deck next to the stairs. “Ready to see and be seen?”

“I just want you to know how much I hate my life right now.” The teak deck chair is sun warmed under Owen's grip as he pulls it out for her, leaning over the woman's shoulder to complain as he pushes it in.

“Owen, we're good looking, brilliant, and old money.  _ What _ is there to hate about being us? Sit down home slice, let's be envied while someone works up the nerve to come find out who you are. I bet you  tomorrow’s chocolates that one of the girls from table six will have someone over here before the drinks arrive.”

“You're not getting my bloody chocolate Cheyenne.”

She would have too, if he'd taken the bait. Within minutes of sitting, thumbs are flying across keyboards and touch screens and the waitress has barely made it back to the bar with their drink order before there's a long, broad shadow across their table.

“Now, I told you at your wedding that if you ever needed a replacement player I was the man to call, and here you are with  _ another _ man that isn't me.” The booming voice that draws every eye not already watching them is deep and southern thick in ways that Cheyenne's never was.

“Obie!” The man reaching down to take Cheyenne's outstretched hand, levering her onto her feet to wrap her in a massive bear hug is old and huge. Age has stooped him, leaving him just a hair under six feet despite the hunch to his shoulders and broad in a way that suggests he's still heavily muscled under the solid curve of his stomach. He picks her up, laughing loudly as she slaps at his shoulder and kicks her feet just enough to draw attention to them before the man settles her back onto her thick heels. “I told you before, your wife is twice my age and could totally take me in a fight. I'm not fighting Idgie, not even for you. Owen, this is Obadiah Schillinger, and nothing is ever fast enough for him. He's an original Kentucky horse man, and don't tell anyone, but he's my favorite stock holder.”

“Everyone knows I'm your favorite , darlin’ . Hardly a secret. Alright son, you've got a look about you that is driving my youngest grandbaby up the wall.” The 'baby' he gestures to is a round faced blonde woman easily in her  mid-twenties  at table six who flushes bright pink and looks away quickly. “She swears to Jesus she knows you from somewhere and now that I'm looking at you, so do I.” Owen presses his lips together in a tight line as he stands to extend his hand and the elderly man slaps his thigh in amusement. “I know that 'too polite to say go fuck yourself' expression, and now that I'm looking at you close I don't know how I missed it. You're the spitting image of your mama when you make that face. You're Myrna's boy Owen.”

“Yes, well I like to think of myself as my own man now.” Their handshake is short but solid.

“Don't we all? Well, I am going to get the wife and we are going to settle right here and do a little catching up with one of my favorite girls while we wait for your mama to walk by and set off the fireworks. Here comes your waitress, let her know table three is joining you for lunch.” Cheyenne grins, tipping her cheek up and snickering as white and grey whiskered face kisses her upturned cheek before the man with the huge white mane of hair wanders off towards the other side of the stairs.

“Great. Enjoy your lunch with your friends, I'll be back in the cabin.” Owen takes a half step back from his seat, pausing as Cheyenne laces her fingers with his, pressing herself against his back to whisper in his ear.

“Like hell you will. Sit down. The Schillinger's are fantastic people who also think your mother is the devil, so you've already got that in common. It's too early for either of us to be getting any  _ real work _ done, so just relax, have a little lunch, and help me keep scanning in visuals on the staff and boy toys that walk by please. I'm not staring at uninteresting strangers for my fucking health Owen. I'm working, and you need to help me because  _ you _ are the senior operative here.”

“Oh, I hate you right now.” He smiles as he says it, squeezing her fingers back roughly enough to let her know he means it and helps her back into her seat before taking his own.

“You'll get over it. Once we've got what we're here for, I don't care if you don't leave the room again, even if it  _ would _ look like you're hiding from Myrna...”

“You're such a bitch.”

“You have not  _ begun _ to see bitch. My guests are coming, and  _ I _ still live in this world so  _ please _ don't be awkward on purpose Owen.”

“Fine.”

Lunch is better than Cheyenne expected. Owen is surprisingly knowledgeable about horses and the only thing Obie respects more than a shrewd business man in a person who knows horses. The two of them are talking about Seven day Salvation, Obie's newest  two-year-old thoroughbred to enter the racing circuit, and his chances at taking a triple crown before his fifth year.

“It hasn't been the same the last couple of years, seeing your mama and daddy at the races without you. I was actually able to see Sunday Hat come in a miserable fourth place last summer without one of these monsters of yours blocking the view from the  owners’ box.” Thick fingers catch the edge of Cheyenne's sun hat, tugging it slightly askew on her head. “Now I met Bubba, we call her daddy Bubba because there was never a man the name suited less, in college; but the first time I met this little lady here she was six years old...”

“Obie, don't tell this story.”

“He's got to shug, you were precious.” Imogene Schillinger is slender, with a flirty little flip of white and silver hair that falls in her eyes when she leans forward. “We still have a picture somewhere Owen. I'll have to get it emailed so I can show you.”

“Anyway, I'm in the  owners’ box waiting for Sixth Avenue Bakery to run and little hint son, don't ever let the kids and grandbabies name your horses, Lord help me. So Idgie and I are sitting there and I spot Bubba coming up the stairs, bent over talking the way he did when his little ones were still little and I'm expecting one of his boys when he asks if his horse is going to win only to hear this  _ teeny _ tiny incredulous voice say ' _ of course not _ daddy. No one's going to beat the big Palomino and when he wins I'm going to  _ pet _ him.'” There's a hint a pink around Cheyenne's ears as the man tries to pitch his deep drawling bass into something that sounds roughly like a Chipmunk. “So Bubba laughs that big laugh of his, she laughs just like her daddy you know, and scoops up this little doll of a girl, even smaller than her voice all in white lace with a hat entirely too big, just like now. Well, long story short, my big Palomino ran and won and his  winner’s photo is him, his jockey on the side, and this little speck of a girl in white lace that barely came up to his chest standing on her tiptoes to rub his neck. Idgie, darlin, have them girls of mine email the picture now.”

“Obie, don't you dare bring that admittedly adorable picture aboard this boat.”

_ ::gwen & I r already in goog-race 2 find it:: _

“Buck up luv, it would be a shame if I'm the only person who never sees how cute you were when you were knee high to a thoroughbred.” Owen grins at her widely and Cheyenne tries not to growl like a crazy person when the words ‘ _ found it! _ ' pop up in their field of vision.

**

Scanning the guests and crew is a massive undertaking. For the moment they're under strict instruction to stay to the public areas of the ship and leave the personnel only decks to the bugs to monitor. They all know the moment they have to force their way below decks, it's going to be a game of cat and mouse with five hundred hostages between Torchwood and the alien they're after. Jack got back to them halfway through lunch to tell them to expect the targets eyes to flash to their natural milky white color and now they're wandering the ship, disruptors resting against their skin to draw power from their body heat while the two of them try to get within ten feet of as many staff members as they can.

“This is a super stupid plan.” Cheyenne throws herself backwards onto the couch as she and Owen let themselves back into their cabin, yanking her hat off at the last moment to keep from crushing it before digging in the small bag she's had draped over her shoulder all afternoon and fishing out a compact mirror, flipping it open. “Okay, this is not going to go the way we're thinking it  would .”

_ ::it'll work fine:: _

“She's right. We seriously underestimated how much coverage we could do.” Owen's stomping across the floor, hands shoved deep in his pockets as he paces. “Half the guest list is intent on having a fucking 'moment of our time' and the goddamned staff keeps disappearing into thin air before we can get them in the ten foot sweet spot. Why do we only have a damn ten foot radius?”

_ ::cuz tosh is genius not jesus:: _

“ He he hell Jack, you're not funny.”

“He he hell?” Owen stops pacing to look incredulously at her.

“Oh shut up. Owen's right though, Jack. From the guest list there's slightly over a hundred and sixty females that are eliminated immediately, thirteen ethnic male passengers, and thirty-two that are outside the height/weight guidelines you gave us. That still leaves us with eighty-eight male passengers fitting the possible parameters. And I know that math is right because I did it earlier with a calculator. Plus the easy access crew like the waitstaff, casino dealers, and ships officers brings us...fucked if I know actually I'm not great with strings of numbers off the top of my head, but it brings us to more than half the people on ship because the crew is like seventy percent male. The point behind the numbers is that we're going to be hauling ass above decks and I'm starting to worry we didn't have enough equipment installed to handle the crew we won't be able to get near without blowing our cover.”

_ ::it's all we can do. Just worry about top now, monitors on lower decks are fine. Get ready for dinner, that will knock a chunk of your list off:: _

“Taking your word for it  darlin’ . Owen, you should go first, it takes me forever to get ready for dinner.”

_ ::it really does:: _

“No comments from the peanut gallery, please.” Owen rolls his eyes, already reaching up to pluck his contacts out on his way into the bathroom, leaving Cheyenne to roll off the couch and settle behind the desk, logging into the laptop there and paging through the scan results. “So, how's my baby doing?”

Owen takes forever to clean up and dress; long enough for Cheyenne to work through the current days readings of seventy  human crew  members scanned, look at the pictures of Ianto and Indy napping on the uncomfortable couch down on the main floor that Gwen emails her, and to put her hair up in roughly ten mini buns on the top of her head to fit under the tam sized shower cap in her toiletries bag.

“Jesus, are you sure you took enough time in there Owen? I'd hate to have rushed you.” She comes out of the chair fast enough that it spins, already kicked out of her shoes when the medic lets himself back into the main area as he threads his pristine white tie through the collar of his crisp black shirt.

“Holy hell, I don't think I've ever seen you in bare feet.” Owen cocks his head, smirking down at her as he slides his hands into the pockets of the slim cut dark grey suit he's wearing. “Even your foam flip flops have a heel. I've seen middle schoolers taller than you and I'll be kind enough not to mention your hair.”

“You are the  _ worst _ kind of man Owen. You really are. I've got  _ less _ than an hour now.” The bedroom door doesn't quite latch as she kicks it closed, not that Cheyenne cares, already tearing herself out of her clothing as she rushes for the bathroom.

The air is hot and moist still from Owen's shower and the vent in the ceiling doesn't seem to have done much of anything except keep the mirrors mostly clear. Condensation has left the marble floors slick and Cheyenne stumbles over the towel he left in the middle of the floor as she twists her arms behind herself.

_ ::I'm ethically obligated 2 remind u ur contacts r still in, but let me add that you're wearing my favorite knickers & every1 else is off 4 dinner :D:: _

She laughs as she flicks the hooks on her bra open with deft twists of her fingers and Owen's voice carries through the bedroom and over the rush of water when she reaches her arm under the shower to turn it on, cursing herself, Jack, and anyone else who may be involved in the 'one sided porno they're eye raping him with'.

“No time now sweetheart, but I'm sure there are at least half a dozen filthy things that could be made even dirtier with these in. We'll figure something out.”

_ ::those need to come out until then:: _

A hammering on the doorjamb startles a squeak out of her as Owen raises his voice.

“Take the bloody things out Cheyenne and cancel any plans you and those two filthy slags of yours are making because I have to sleep on the other side of that bed!”

“Don't be a spoilsport Owen, God! Go do something useful please because these aren't coming out just to go back in five minutes from now. Don't get him wound up please Jack, he's high strung enough right now.”

It's the shortest shower she's ever taken in civilization, in and out of the deliciously hot water and scurrying out of the bathroom with a towel barely wrapped around her in less than fifteen minutes. There's nothing coming through from the Hub, despite the fact that three times she's forgotten that her eyes are a camera and looked down while slathering lotion on her still wet skin, and she's not sure if Jack's been distracted by something with the rift or if he simply understood how serious she was when she told him Owen was walking the fine edge of a nervous breakdown. Either way, there hasn't been so much as a suggestive smiley face as she dries, lotions, spreads on foundation, twists her hair up into an elaborate twist and fall style and wiggles her way into the vividly peacock toned lingerie.

“Alright, whatever weird shit you two are doing...” The bedroom door is slung open, startling her into tumbling over onto the bed as Cheyenne is slipping into her shoes.

“You have an unhealthy obsession with my sex life Owen.” He doesn't blush and she's not sure if he can but Owen does look up at the ceiling as Cheyenne sits up, adjusting the twisted line of her stockings before crossing the room and hopping up to perch on the edge of the dresser and do her makeup in the mirror there. “It's not flattering. Also, it's really funny how the guy who made a ninety minute porno with me in it is staring at the ceiling when I'm at least dressed in my underwear.”

“Completely different. I also didn't think you knew about that.” Now there's an actual flush of uncomfortable red burning around Owen's ears as he hooks his thumbs in his pockets again and keeps his gaze away from the mirror.

“Oh, yeah. I've seen it and everything. Look, you're between me and my robe so if you're going to stand there awkwardly staring upwards just hand it to me.” Heavy weight plush white terrycloth is dropped into her out stretched hand when she holds it out imperiously “Thank you.” The crisp winter white of the robe encloses her completely and Owen looks down with an arched eyebrow.

“Yeah, well the Teaboy is alarmingly spiteful and I don't need him deciding I've been oogling the merchandise because your boy is not above smegging about with my food.”

“That is genuinely hilarious that you're scared of my boy. So, any particular reason you burst in here like a crazy man demanding I stop having the phone sex sans phone that I'm actually not having?”

“Couldn't think of any other reason Jack would be that quiet.” She watches him through the mirror as he slumps against the other wall before leaning closer to the glass and running a stubby sharply angled brush through the pitch black gel in a little pot in her hands, whipping the eyeliner up into a thick winged line.

“It's probably a rift alert, because I kept looking in the mirror before I was dressed and got nothing. Or it's one of the girls and they're giving me some privacy.” Years of practice have her blending a neutral smokey eye on quickly before smudging a startling pop of teal at the corners. “Your mother has yet to rise from the pits to cause a scene, so I'm assuming she's made some sort of arrangement to catch us 'unaware' at dinner tonight.”

“That sounds like her. She'll want an audience for her first public shunning of me in fifteen years. God she's such a bitch.” She can't agree with him, not with her mouth dropped gently open as she lines her lips, but he obviously understands the sympathetic noise she makes as she re-sculpts the bow of her mouth.

“Yeah, well like you  said.”  Her lips compresses and plump as Cheyenne leans closer to the mirror, slicking on her lipstick and pressing her mouth together.  “She's  a bitch. Watch out, you're between me and my dress.” The carpeting soaks up the clump of her heels hitting the floor as Cheyenne slides off the dresser and back on her feet, tossing her robe onto the bed and shimmying into the long body skimming fall of charcoal silk. “Come zip me.” Only the very edges of her shimmering blue-green heels peek out from under the hem as she scoops her hair up off the back of her neck, baring the zipper.

“Haven't had to  _ dress _ a bird in a while.” The zipper goes up with a low purr. “Come on, we're going to be late.”

***

They are actually running late, despite Cheyenne's insistence that it's impossible for her to be late to anything, and by the time they make it to the aft of the ship and the stained glass and flora studded La Terrazza everyone else at the Captain's table is seated and there's nothing in either of them that's surprised to see Myrna Harper twisted coquettishly in her chair. She's got her silver and blonde hair twisted up at the nape of her neck into a slick complicated knot, a side swept fall of fringe curved to rest on the round swell of her cheek as she watches the two of them approach the table. A mouth fuller and not quite as wide as Owen's twitches up into an amused little moue, even as the grey, almost violet eyes staring directly at them remain flat and hateful.

“Owen, darling, I see you still haven't learned to be respectful of other peoples time. Ms. Sterling.”

“It's still Doctor Morgan, Myrna but I suppose at your age things just start slipping faster and faster.” Owen pulls her chair out, standing behind it to help her into it.

“Particularly the unimportant things. Aren't you going to kiss your mother Owen?” Cheyenne keeps her face perfectly still as Owen shoves her chair in a bit  too hard, before perching in his own at her side, beaming an obviously fake photo ready smile across the table.

“Absolutely not Myrna.”

“Charming as always Owen. I see neither your manners nor your taste in women has improved since the last time I saw you.” The vein at the base of Owen's throat is throbbing hard enough that Cheyenne can't keep from cutting her gaze to where the svelte line of the doctor's suit is undisturbed by the slim holster and compact Beretta he's carrying instead of his normal Taurus small-frame before reaching over and letting her fingertips rest on the top of his wrist.

“Oh, the curses we inherit from our fathers.” The corner of Owen's mouth tips up for just a second as his mother whips the full force of her glare towards the younger woman across the table from her and Cheyenne ignores her, leaving her hand pressed on his as she rocks to the side, pressing their shoulders together as she looks around him to where the Schillingers are watching on in amusement. “Obediah, you know I'm late and haven't been introduced yet. You don't mind doing the honors for me, do you?”

Dinner is long, almost painfully so as Cheyenne and Myrna find any excuse to sling short brutal quips and asides at each other without ever missing a beat in the flow of conversation going on around them. All the guests at their table, as well as the captain, first mate, and every server to come their way have passed the disruptor test since  no one’s  eyes have turned to milky white  over-sized  orbs and they're all gathered around the remains of their desserts making plans to move in two clusters to either the casino or the bar when the older woman gives Owen a small disappointed smile, leaning in close enough to give the appearance of aiming for privacy.

“Owen, I've heard rumors of a child that hasn't been brought out to be seen yet.  _ Do _ tell me it isn't yours.”

“Related to you, what an utterly appalling thought.” The shudder that runs the line of Cheyenne's body is genuine, as is the murderously cold look in her eyes as she twists to face Myrna fully. “No, my son is not Owen's.”

“Hmm, not my son's, not your husband's...that does rather widen the field, doesn't it? I do hope your deplorable taste hasn't left you  _ disappointed _ . Children do that you know.”

_ ::ignore her:: _ The only thing being ignored are the instructions flashing in the bottom corner of her vision as Cheyenne straightens her back, dropping her voice and leaning forward so that her low growl doesn't carry past the table.

“There is  _ nothing _ wrong with Indiana and if I don't drag him out like a preforming bear to parade in front of you it's because  _ my _ child is the center of my universe and not my way to dig greedy, desperate fingers into someone else's fortune. Also, I'm hardly going to let someone who was arguably the  _ worst _ parent in our entire circle give me so much as a sideways look about my choices when every bit of what makes Owen amazing is very obviously the result of his father and a never ending revolving door of nannies. Things that eat their offspring are better mothers than you were Myrna. Now if you ladies and gentlemen will excuse us, I think Owen and I will be heading to the casino after all. I suddenly feel like I couldn't  _ possibly _ leave this boat without having taken quite a lot of money from someone.” The two women glare at each other as Cheyenne pushes to her feet, chin tilted up and shoulders squared back as she throws her threat on the table. Owen rests his hand on the small of her back and grins down at the table.

“Well, as much as I have missed these colorful little squabbles, I'm afraid we really must be on our way. We'll be at the blackjack table if anyone feels like joining us.”


	5. Chapter 5

“Mummaaaaaaaaa!” Ianto jerks awake as Indiana goes from  fitfu l sleep to mournful shriek directly in his ear, tiny fat hands slapping down on the bare skin of Ianto's chest.

“Mummy's  _ still _ working with Owen! Why'd you have to notice  _ last night _ ?” More specifically,  sometime around one-thirty this morning Indy woke up screaming for his mother and has yet to actually stop. Ianto has done everything he can think of. His son has been changed three times, feed more than he probably should have been, left to cry it out in his cot, rescued from his cot by Ianto's guilt and brought into the very empty big bed with Daddy. He's even been settled into an architectural fiasco of baby herding involving building a pen out of Ianto's sleeping body, every pillow on the bed and both dogs while a twenty-four hour station devoted to nothing but baby cartoons sang obnoxiously and still Indiana has yet to do more than doze fretfully, only to jerk awake shrieking for his mother and smacking his hands off anything he can reach because, of course, when his mother is gone is when he decides to learn to hit.

“Ja!”

“Jack's at work watching mummy! Baban, it is...” Ianto peels his eyes open despite their refusal to follow his commands on the first try to stare uncomprehendingly at the clock willing the numbers to make more sense than that. “Indy, it's a quarter to four in the morning and daddy is going to cry if you don't shut the hell up and go to sleep.”

“Mamamamama! Ja!”

“Jack and mummy aren't home!” Ianto buries his face in Cheyenne's pillow, kicking his feet in frustration as Indiana melts down back into the same tantrum he's been having all night. “I miss mummy too, so hush! I miss mummy, the puppies miss mummy, Jack misses mummy! We  _ all  _ miss mummy and you're the only one crying!” Somewhere under the exhaustion and annoyance Ianto knows he's being unreasonable. Really, he understands that it's not fair that he's even said that but he's  _ tired _ . He is tired, he hasn't stopped worrying about Cheyenne and to a lesser extent Owen, (even if he has no intention of admitting it) over the last four days they've been at sea, and although the two of them are out of their cabin and mingling from sun up to long after the sun has disappeared under the waves there's been not a trace of their target. It's been long enough without so much as a whiff of their target that Jack hasn't left the Hub in almost two days now, scanning the stationary bugs obsessively and trying things no one but Tosh understands to try and boost their signal from almost a thousand kilometers away. So far it's looking to be one of their most labor intensive, expensive failures and that's not counting the tickets that Chy is comping for them as a tax write-off. Indiana flops over off of his father, shrill shrieks of baby rage melting into gasping sobs of such obvious baby despair that Ianto's upright before he thinks about it, cradling his son against his chest and trying not to feel like the dogs are judging him as they watch him shift from foot to foot trying to get his kid to stop making that sound like he's so sad he can't breathe. “No. No, no, no, daddy's sorry. Shhh, daddy's  _ really _ sorry. We'll go see Jack, okay? We'll go see Jack and we can cuddle on the couch. Again.” Even though this is only the second time since Cheyenne left that they've made it home longer than it takes to change clothes, repack the diaper bag, and feed the dogs. He's starting to wish he'd just put them in the kennel instead of insisting he could deal with them as well as the baby, particularly when they start whining themselves the moment he turns the closet light on. “I can't take you two crying as well. This is why I used to only have plants.”

There's a bouncy swing in the walk in, taking up the space that should be for Jack's shoes except for the fact that the man only owns a pair of black military dress boots, a pair of beaten up grey trainers that Ianto's not sure are supposed to be grey, and the brown boots that are probably kicked off under Jack's desk right now. Indiana screams the entire time Ianto's getting dressed, crying big fat tears and hurling himself around in his bouncer hard enough that Ianto cringes with every shriek and lunge, waiting for the entire setup to collapse and send his already traumatized kid spilling to the floor. He's already  half-dressed  before he remembers that he hasn't actually made it to the shower or even to the deodorant and thumps his head against the wall before putting the rest of his clothes on a little rougher than normal and telling himself that he can always shower and change back into his clothes at the Hub, even if it kind of feels like his clothes are dirty now. Dressing Indy doesn't go any better. He tries to hurl himself off the changing table twice, squirms himself half out of everything Ianto puts on him and screams loud enough that the dogs both come bolting into the room, ears up and eyes narrowed in a way that reminds Ianto uncomfortably that their loyalty goes 'Mummy, Indy, not biting the guys in mummy's house'.

“You two fuck off. He's fine and misses mummy.”

It was an  ill-advised word to utter. Indiana stops screaming long enough to look hopefully behind Ianto who uses the break to shove his child's arms back into the black and grey stripped sweater and fasten the little charcoal corduroys he’s been scooting half out of. The dogs have flopped down on their stomachs, belly crawling closer to Ianto and whining  pitifully, which  sets Indy back into sobbing desperately.

Crying should be an improvement over screaming. It isn't. Instead Ianto spends the entire time he's throwing pre-measured formula packets and extra baby food into the bag trying to  soothe Indy back down into a low growl. The dogs are howling now, lying next to the garage door and refusing to go near the back yard when he slings the sliding doors open.

“Not you guys too. I can't take it. Get outside now!” He refuses to feel guilty as everything in the kitchen flinches back from his shout before the two of them slink by him, curly tails drooping as he sends them out into the pitch blackness of the predawn. He knows they spend all day in the small, otherwise empty, stables out by the side fields where they've got water in one of the low troughs and food in one of those auto timers that he's relying on a lot more than he thought he would. The dogs go exactly to the other side of the glass doors and no further, sitting there and staring up at him as Ianto closes the door, slings the black leather diaper bag over his shoulder and walks out to the garage. He makes it as far as backing his Audi out of the garage before stopping and dropping his head to the steering wheel in disgust and pulling back into the space Chy's corvette normally takes. He gets Indy out of the car seat, setting him back into a low grizzle, runs in and out of the garage to unpack the boot into Cheyenne's Honda, and starts the thing warming up outside in the four am blackness before carrying Indiana back through the house to the family room where the dogs are, just as he feared, still sitting perfectly still and baying on the other side of the door. “I can't believe I'm doing this. Come on, let's go. To the truck, let's bloody well go please!” Their wrinkled faces shift from heartbreak to drop jawed joy as the dogs prance in an excited circle around his legs before dashing off through the house as he slams the door shut and locks it again.

The drive into town is long and equally  unpleasant . Ianto feels perfectly awake, but he's got the windows cracked in case that changes and Indiana hates that despite the blankets he's huddled under. He cries all the way into downtown, not stopping until they're pulled into the drive through at McDonalds.

“I obviously need to buy an enormous set of golden arches to just shine down on him every time he won't stop crying.” The kid who used to do overnights on the drive through is gone, but Ianto likes his replacement, a woman in her early thirties who always looks tired in a way that Ianto recognizes from the inside as the look of a parent without enough hours in the day to add sleep.

“If I had a pound for every time someone said that I wouldn't be working here. Kind of early for such a full car, isn't it?” The woman takes Ianto's bag from a disembodied arm that shoves it in her direction, peeking in it before rolling her eyes and disappearing for a moment. “I told him to throw a couple of those off the clock burgers from the steamer in for the dogs and he forgot  ‘em . Here you go, breakfast and two puppy burgers. Hope he stays asleep for you.”

Cheyenne left a  metric fuck ton`  of 'reminders' in a note in Ianto's phone including importing what feels like her entire address book and he's glad now that she did as he idles in the restaurant parking lot, slipping his bluetooth in his ear.

“Call kennel; night number.” The note next to the number on his phone says that Chy's got an agreement with them about taking her dogs on no notice any time of day. The phone rings twice before a voice entirely too cheerful for just past four in the morning answers. It takes less than five minutes to make the arrangements to drop off the dogs, and twenty minutes later he's pulling into the Hub, unsurprised to see Jack sitting on the hood of the Torchwood SUV tapping away at the tablet in his hands.

“I bought you breakfast, but then it started to get cold while I dropped off the dogs, so I ate it.” Ianto has the windows rolled down before he kills the engine smirking at Jack as the older man slides off the bonnet of the truck.

“You did not, I can still see the bag in the passenger side seat.”

“Oh.” The white and red bag is indeed still neatly folded between Jack at the window and Ianto who felt perfectly fine two minutes ago and now is too tired to remember to hide the bag of food. “Well, that's my cue to go back to bed. Congratulations, in the absence of 'you-know-who'--”

“Voldemort?”

“I hate you. Yes, the Dark Lord, and in her absence, you are officially the preferred substitute. I kind of wish you were Owen so I could make fun of you for being the replacement her.”

“Right, if you're wishing I'm  _ Owen _ then you're obviously more tired than I thought. Bunk for you, I'll keep this with me for a while.” Indiana's managed to, finally, cry himself to sleep and because he's a brat, stays that way when Jack jiggles the seat out of the truck. “Don't wait for us, head up and get some sleep.”

***

The morning doesn't get any better.

Indiana has Myfanwy almost as worked up as the dogs with his crying. She keeps circling the floor, scolding down at them in loud cries that only make things worse by startling Indy into shrieking again and beginning the cycle anew. The fact that she keeps dropping lower isn't reassuring Ianto. He likes to make sure she has a couple of things in her aerie that smell like Ianto and Indy so that she associates the baby with people and not food, but he isn't sure the shrill desperate nature of a distressed baby's cries aren't confusing her.

“Jack, come take Indy into your office please. She's down low enough she'll have to land to get back up.”

“I think I've got something, give him to one of the girls.” Jack's hair is ruffled from dragging his hands through his hair and the rolling white board he's got set up next to the monitoring station is covered in incomprehensible equations in Jack's wide copperplate print, corrected in Tosh's tiny neat script in places, some of which are re-corrected back with shorthand notes Ianto can't begin to identify. There are soldering tools on the workbench pushed slightly behind the immortal man and he never takes his eyes off the wires he's gripping in one hand as he reaches backwards behind himself and grabs something golden in color and alien in origin without fumbling.

“They aren't in yet. You gave them the morning off so they'd take the overnight and you could get some bloody sleep at some point this week! It's only seven-thirty and she's entirely too interested in him since he started screaming Jack. I'm  _ trying _ to separate them before she lands.” Which is any minute now from the way she's angling down around the walkways. “And I don't have the stun bat on me, so if she comes at us I'm going to shoot her.”

“Jesus, fine!” Wires get twisted together quickly and Jack comes up from his crouch with a glower, goggles shoved back to the top of his head. He spins and pauses, frowning over Ianto's shoulder. “She's um, she's sneaking up behind you.” She's landed quietly on the ground without either of them noticing and she freezes, head cocked intently to the side as Ianto looks over his shoulder.

“Fucking hell.  _ Take _ him.”

“Come here you. You've got your daddy's dinosaur half convinced you're actually a loud and tasty snack, so let's stop that, okay?” Ianto turns his back to Jack as soon as he's got Indy cradled against him, turning to glare the pterosaur into stopping her advance.

“ _ You _ had better stop stalking my baby or I will shoot you.” The noise she makes is less aggression and more distress as she continues to take little waddling hops sideways, continuing to creep closer to Ianto even as her head twists to follow Jack's progression into his office. “No! No babies for you! What's wrong with you today?” She takes one more hop forward and smacks her head sideways against his chest, warbling low in her throat as she rubs her head into his  chest until Ianto reaches up with both hands, scratching at the base of her crest. The skin there has gotten dry, Jack says prehistoric earth had much moister air, and it must be driving her crazy. Her squat grey body shivers with pleasure as he works the tips of his fingers in a circle to keep from breaking the irritated skin. “Shit, I forgot to give you a bath this week.” Which means she hasn't been oiled down either and her entire body must itch something fierce. “I'm sorry sweetheart. Daddy is an overtired failure this week.”

“Have you dealt with the dinosaur yet?” Jack's voice directly in his ear is  _ still _ almost drowned out by Indiana's screams.

“I forgot bath day. She was stalking me, not the baby. I'll take care of it as soon as I get back from dropping Indiana off at nursery.”

“It's a sad reflection of how busy we are that I missed bath day.” Because Jack is as big a fan of bath day as Myfanwy, although he's more into the soaking wet, oil slick aftermath. “Send her to her room to wait for you because I can't have her trying to scratch her itch by thumping me when I'm rewiring. Not unless you'd like to come back to find she electrocuted both of us.”

“Not particularly, no. Let me slap some lotion on the worst of the dry spots and I'll be right up for my monster.”

***

Ianto does not drop Indiana off at daycare.

He  _ tries _ to. No one can say he doesn't  _ try _ to drop his son off with the cheerful brunette wearing a name tag that says Ann and heading up the under one's room because he does. He comes in, tired and lugging Indy still strapped to his car seat because he was screaming and contorting himself too much to try unstrapping, indulges in a 'how did you guess' when the woman asks if Dr. Morgan is still away for work, and settles the car seat overly gently at the woman's feet.

He makes it almost out the door of the sunny yellow room before Indiana begins to cry again. He freezes, shoes stuck to the floor listening to his little boy sob and stumble over his baby babble.

“He's fine Mr. Jones. He's a little overworked, his  schedule's been altered this week, and it's all catching up to him. He'll stop after you've gone.”

“No he won't. He hasn't stopped crying for more than half an hour at a time in the last six.” He shouldn't turn around and he knows it, but Indy sounds like his very small world is ending. Ann snags him by the sleeve, steering him towards the door and the cluster of mothers that parts for him.

“Yes he will. He will stop and be perfectly fine by the time he's picked up.”

He makes it out the door and halfway down the brightly lit, white tiled hall before he can't take another step away from the sound of his name being called and ten minutes later he's staring hopelessly down at Indiana's blotchy face while buckling the carseat and it's occupant back into the truck.

“Well friend, I'm not sure how I'm going to find time to wash the dinosaur  _ or _ how I'll explain to Jack why I brought you back, but I've got a ten minute drive to figure it out.”

“Maaama!”

“Tell me about it.”

***

If there's a bright spot to the day so far, it seems to be that Indiana has decided to stop screaming as long as he's being held and that's a sacrifice Ianto and Jack are willing to make right now. He lays against their chests, limp and unhappy, thumb stuck securely in his mouth and Ianto goes about as much of his day as he can one handed with the lapel of his jacket being crushed in a small sweaty fist. He actually falls asleep feeding Indiana in the conference room and wakes up with his feet in Owen's chair with Jack's coat draped over him and the snuffly little form in his arms.

“Oh friend, sleeping wasn't on the list for today. Well not for me anyway. Jesus, I can't take another two days and nights of this.”

The Hub is always quieter without Owen around to starts fights, turn his music up too loud, and randomly start screaming dirty jokes back and forth with Jack although the noise from the monitoring station is at least doing something to break the silence. Gwen is flopped down in the station, snacking on something in a brown paper bag as she splits her time between staring at the live feed on the right hand side and playing back footage of last night's encounter at the viewing lounge between Cheyenne and Myrna Harper on the left.

"Gwen, tell me you've not actually got popcorn?" She doesn't even have the shame to turn around guiltily. Instead she crunches another handful loudly and kicks her feet up on the folding chair she keeps there for just this reason, wiggling them in excitement.

"Indeed I do. This is awesome. It's like watching the red carpet and reading the rags at the same time. So far I've seen two politicians with women who are not their wives, one with a  _ man _ who is definitely not his wife, and watched the most fantastic verbal rematch between Cheyenne and Owen's mum. I'm not quite sure who won, but I've never seen two women hate each other so politely. I kept waiting for someone to take a swing. It was fantastic, the cattiest thing I have ever seen. Ask Tosh."

"She was spectacular Ianto. Like  a perfectly written bit of daytime telly." Tosh pops up behind him, bracing herself on his arm to lean across him and kiss Indiana on his cheek. He squeals and coos, the first happy sound he's made all day, twisting around in Ianto's arms and reaching out for Tosh's glasses. "Aren't your arms tired yet? You've been carrying him all day."

"I'm exhausted. He doesn't seem like he weighs a ton until about hour three, but the alternative is one of those harness things." He lets his expression speak for him in his singular disgust of the snuggli. "How the hell does Cheyenne do this all day? She's half my bloody size."

"For one, she doesn't actually carry him around all day, I'm sure, and when she does, she ties him in one of those slings. Come here sweetie, come to Auntie Tosh."

"You are a glowing goddess among women. He's been crying since last night when he realized that he hadn't seen his mum for a while. The only time he stops now is when someone's holding him, and then he just hangs on us and looks sad. I couldn't even leave him at nursery today. I got halfway down the hall and he was still screaming. I turned around and went back in and picked him right back up despite three very polite ladies trying to convince me he'd stop as soon as I left. In a  one-on-one  battle of wills with my nine month old, I'm outnumbered and failing as a parent, Tosh."

"Aww. My poor woobie." It's a sure sign of mental exhaustion that for a brief second Ianto not only thinks that Tosh is talking to him, but he does not mind being her woobie, as long as someone can get his kid to calm down. Tosh shoves her glasses to the top of her hair and relative safety as Indy reaches up, cradling her face in his fat little hands and chewing on her chin in an approximation on a kiss. "It can't be that bad, can it darling?"

"Jack did a call to the  _ palace _ with Indiana in his lap because he was whimpering in his sleep."

"Well he can watch the monitors with me for a couple hours. I'll have Cheyenne find a mirror and switch the input to sub-audio so he can talk to his mummy. Come on woobie, let's talk to mummy on the computer." Tosh gives Ianto a reassuring pat on the arm as she hitches Indy up on her hips and makes her way over to Gwen and her popcorn, leaving Ianto to wander, over tired and aimless up to Jack's office.

Jack is slumped at his desk, glaring at the incomplete case file that sent Owen and Chy on a cruise to Morocco where they're blending in seamlessly in a way that makes Ianto strangely uncomfortable.

"I think I'm jealous of Owen." Ianto flops down in the visitor's chair, throwing his legs over the arm and snatching one of Jack's ever rotating collection of weird alien time wasters off the front of the desk. It seems to be a puzzle that changes shape, scent, and color every time he snicks the seven pieces into a sphere. "The  self-awareness  of it all is making me kind of nauseous."

"Don't be, she'd wear him out and snap him in half." Jack misses the startled expression of disgust that flickers across Ianto's face at his distracted response, eyes glued to the expense reports. From the disarray of his hair, he's trying to figure out how to justify the expense of this operation to the crown if they have no results.

"Wait...what?" He looks up from twisting the interlocking red spicy scented slivers around their pivot point. "Chy and...no! No, sick. No, you're obviously too distracted for me to vent too if you thought I was worried about Owen trying it on with Chy. It's fine, I was just gobbing off, don't worry about it..." He's settling the puzzle back onto the corner of the desk, ready to go muck out the aerie or something else strenuous to distract him from the low burning humiliation of it all. He's not sure what possessed him to wander up to Jack's office and flop into the chair any way. It's not what they do, he and Jack, not really. This is more how he spends his  non-essential  hours with Cheyenne, taking boxes of files or artifacts up the stairs to her larger office and sprawling in  _ her _ visitors chair just like this, rambling on about whatever may be bothering him and enjoying the fact that she's excellent at multitasking. She almost never looks up at him, which is good, since he rarely looks over at her, but despite how little attention she seems to be paying she always has an opinion. He's not sure how he let himself forget, even for a moment that this isn't what he and Jack have. Jack looks up, confused as he wraps his hand around Ianto's wrist and for a moment they feel off balance, just the two of them.

"You...sorry, I was a million miles away hating finding space in this quarterly summary for this clusterfuck. Don't go. Give me five minutes, really, and I'll be all yours." And just that quick, the off kilterness of it all rights itself. Ianto lets Jack tug him back down to the chair, leaning over and grabbing the pink papers from the back of the folder.

"I'll double check your maths then."

He's still in the process of going through the sheet of figures with a pencil, baffling at the fact that a man who regularly does sums bordering on theoretical in his head can continuously fail at balancing the bloody finances, when he feels Jack's eyes resting steadily on him.

"So..."

"Have you  _ seen _ them? Not just monitoring them, I know you've been doing that, but have you actually watched the two of them mingling through the crowds? It's kinda creeping me out watching Owen hobnobbing with the super rich and fitting in. They're talking about the chances this one's horse has of winning the Kentucky Derby or the car that one's racing in Monaco this year and he's blending right in. Like a completely different person than the jerk that likes to hide my keys and clog the abysmally ancient plumbing in the tourist office. It's  _ creepy _ . Like watching a frighteningly  well-mannered  Owen clone." Ianto can't stop the uncomfortable fidgeting he's doing, sinking lower into his chair and tapping out the baseline to a Tool song on the edge of his chair with the eraser on the pencil.

"Do you wish you were there instead?"

"I feel faintly humiliated if I even  _ think _ about being there instead of Owen for too long. I would have stood out like a sore fucking thumb. It would have been like her Christmas party all over again, but without being able to hang around the rest of the team and the bar all night. I would have spent the entire operation feeling fake, pretentious, and vaguely stupid, spouting off whatever I could remember from the dossiers and bloody Owen barely skimmed them because he knows all this shite from when he was a kid. They grew up the same, Jack and I just..."

"You're just an idiot." The amused fondness in the immortal man's voice isn't helping the urge to punch something that's been building in him since he started venting his thoughts. Jack gets up, draping his arms around Ianto, resting his weight on him to keep him in the chair, even as he nuzzles at the hair above his ear that's trying to curl again despite having his hair cut just a couple weeks ago.

"Oh thanks. Piss off."

"Calm down." Jack's voice rumbles deep in his chest where it's pressed to Ianto's back. "You have  _ got _ to let this go, or it's just going to come around and make you feel like an idiot for real when Cheyenne comes home, and you're still obsessing that there's something wrong with you because you didn't grow up with Arabians in the stables. We save the world on a regular basis Ianto Jones, and I promise you that's more than good enough for  _ anyone _ . Also, everyone thought you were charming, witty, and well informed, so you have got to let the Christmas party go. It's March." Jack's hands slide up his chest to rest on Ianto's shoulders, squeezing once before patting them. "So, where's himself and why isn't he shrieking at the top of his impressive lungs?"

"Tosh has him on the monitors. I think he's thoroughly sick of us and our inability to produce his mum on demand."

"He'll get over it one day, if not, I'll put the therapy for it on the expense accounts."


	6. Chapter 6

 

Gwen's been ousted from her position in front of the screen bank by the time Ianto comes back down the stairs and is slumped in her own chair, chin propped on her palm and headphones leaking Interpol out from their cheap ear pieces. She startles when he flicks the right side off her ear. “If you don't want Jack catching you muting the live feeds you should turn that down a bit.”

 

“It's not muted, it's just...really quiet? Oh shut up.” She huffs and jabs at the keyboard, shutting off the media player because of course the only macros Gwen bothers to learn are the ones to run her iTunes when she's not supposed to. “I just...I can't listen to all that bloody engine noise anymore. It's doing my head in! I don't know why we have to have sound on the lower level feeds anyway. This isn't a crime show, he's not going to sneak down to the engine room to rub his hands together and tell us his entire _scheme_ out loud just to hear his own bloody voice!” Her face pinks as Ianto lets one eyebrow creep up his forehead, arching incredulously as she fidgets. “That happened _once_. Once doesn't set a precedence! I've got a _headache_ and it's loud damnit.”

 

“Well at least set the low noise filter on the recording and turn the closed captioning on.”

 

“We've got closed captioning?” The keys clack as Ianto leans around her, yanking up menus and altering controls.

 

“Since Nineteen eighty-six according to Mainframe. Audio to text in seventeen Earth languages was the first successful run of her real-time translation systems. There's a forty second lag, but it's enough to let you know what section of the tape to isolate and listen to on review. Tosh has this awesome little cheat book of keyboard shortcuts that she programed into all the systems. You should borrow it.”

 

“I did and all I can remember is how to swap the songs on the iTunes, and auto hide the media player. We can't all remember every weird fact in the history of mankind.” The little black text box pops up on the bottom of the screen, a blinking white cursor waiting to translate any non-mechanical sounds and Gwen whacks the side of his arm with the back of her fingers, shoving her hair behind her ears. “Showoff.”

 

“You're welcome Gwen. Enjoy your music while still safely doing your job, Gwen.”

 

“ _Thank you_.” If she rolls her eyes any harder they're going to fall out.

 

“Better.” She smiles despite herself at the prim twist of his mouth as he pretends to ignore her, following the sound of Indiana's chortling around the Rift manipulator and back to the monitoring station. Tosh has Indy in a bib and he's gnawing at those unbreakable brick-like teething biscuits, slobbering spit and cookie slime all over the side of his face down to where Tosh's hand holds him securely in her lap, bouncing him on her knee. She's got one screen, the smallest, repeating a loop of conversation Owen and Cheyenne had a couple nights ago about something obviously funny because she fills the screen laughing and the infant is hooked, babbling up at the image. “Oh, you've made Tosh all gross.”

 

“Uk!” He doesn't bother tearing his eyes from the screen, just yanks the teething biscuit from his mouth and shoves it though Toshiko's hair to show his father the well ground down surface before shoving it back into his open maw, hair still attached. It either says something amazing about Toshiko's patience or frightening about her level of focus that she doesn't seem to notice being slimed and added to the snack.

 

“Yes, Daddy sees you have a yucky.” Because of course Jack insisted on calling them yucky after his first advised against attempt to eat one, and since he has yet to stop doing it _every single time_ he hands one to Indiana, his son now thinks that's what they're called. Ianto snags his handkerchief out of his pocket, kneeling next to Tosh and trying to figure out how to get her hair out of his kid's mouth without hurting someone. “Does your mouth hurt? Not to sound callous, but Daddy would _love_ hearing you've been a rotten little beast all day because your mouth hurts.”

 

“Oh, that's not nice to say at all, is it woobie?” Tosh doesn't look away from the screen, but she does almost poke Ianto's eye out moving her hand as he leans in to try and get the half mushy and yet still cement hard teething biscuit away from Indy.

 

“Oh I see, take the side of the person who's chewing arrowroot flour into your ponytail right now.”

 

“What...oh, ew Indiana.” He squeals with glee that Tosh sounds so disgusted and Ianto manages to pry the not-food from his chubby fist, tugging it free of her hair and offering the messy end of her ponytail to Tosh between two pinched fingers with a grimace of apology as he wipes the worst of the mess off the boy.

 

“Sorry.”

 

“It's okay. Every time I start to think I'm missing out on something because I don't have one, I find myself glad I get to hand him back to you. I've got everything set up. Let me go wash this out of my hair and when I get back I can go ahead and patch you two in to Cheyenne so he can talk to his mum for a little bit.”

 

“Mamamamaaaa!” Ianto takes a slimy jab to the cheek lifting him off Tosh's lap when his kid is faster than him and it leaves him squinting and shuddering.

 

“Sick. That was sick, friend and Daddy wants you to know that. Come on, let's clean you up. I'm pretty sure your mother can hear when you're sticky. Where are your wipes?” It takes a good ten minutes to track down the diaper bag and scrub the half dried paste off of his disgruntled kid who insists on squirming and flailing and remaining grubby and Tosh is waiting for them by the time they get back cursor hovering over a button on the screen under Cheyenne leaning on the dresser in a white swimsuit. Jack is chuckling at something under his breath, his hip pressed against the edge of the desk while he runs the rift predictor from his wrist strap and Chy frowns at the mirror.

 

“Tell Jack he's a dick. Is this check in for a reason, or are you just missing the dulcet tones of my voice?” It's always weird how good Mainframe's sound replication system is, how clear Chy's voice is compared to a phone. Indy lurches forward, arms pinwheeling for the screen and Tosh sends a message through, gives him a thumbs up and clicks the button.

 

“There she is! You see mummy? Say hi to mummy!” His grip almost isn't enough to keep the child off the floor as he rocks forward, arms flung towards the cameras and squeals her name at the top of his range, gleeful beyond words.

 

“Hi baby!” Ianto can see the minute her eyes start to well and lifts Indiana's arm, helping him wave to the monitor as she flails her hands cheerfully around.

 

“Mamamamam!” Her mouth wobbles, breath hitching hard and for a moment Ianto thinks she's going to lose it and he has no idea what he's supposed to do if she starts crying but he is willing to bet every quid he's ever made that if she starts, Indiana will be right behind her. Instead she takes another, deeper breath and blows it out loudly, fluffing the fringe in her face and drawing thrilled giggles from their son.

 

“My big boy! Are you being good for Jack and Daddy?” Ianto lets them flail at each other as long as he can and if he blinks a little fast instead of laughing when Indy chews on his fingers and slaps them against the screen in the worst attempt at blowing a kiss Ianto's ever seen, no one can prove it. That said, only ten minutes into the conversation and Cheyenne keeps pausing to steady her voice and Indiana's mood starts to plummet with every tremble of his mother's mouth.

 

“Alright, this is about to go very wrong.” Jack leans around Tosh, big hands spanning the width of Indiana's torso as he lifts him out of Ianto's lap. “We've got other feeds we have to watch, we're closing the link out. Tell mummy bye.” He's unprepared for the noise his infant makes when Jack says the word bye. It's awful, the kind of sound that makes every single nerve in Ianto's body demand he stand up and make that noise stop no matter what the cost.

 

“Jesus.” Her voice is choked, eyes wide and body tense as she tries to pinpoint the direction of a sound that was literally all in her head. “I have to go. I have to go offline.”

 

“Hey, don't you dare! Cheyenne, leave those in!” She's not going to. Not when she's twisting herself away from the mirror to get the holding case for the contacts. She's wild eyed and pale as she stares earnestly at them through her own eyes.

 

“Ship two is non-com.” Her fingers bisect the image and then the screen goes black as she flips the contacts out and breaks the power circuit that uses her as the battery.

 

“She just...she took the damn things out. Damn it.” Ianto flips the monitor over to one of the room cameras and stops, finger frozen mid jab over the mouse as Cheyenne presses her hands over her mouth until her knuckles go white, shoulders shaking as she slumps to the ground and draws herself up as tightly as possible into a miserable little ball. They've lost sound without the contacts but Ianto doesn't need it to know exactly how hard she's crying, not when he can see it. “Just...tell Owen to go back to the room in fifteen minutes if she hasn't put the contacts back in herself by then. I've got to go try and calm my brat down again.” He minimizes the feed, knocking Chy to the smallest camera on the relay and letting the rest of the feeds repopulate the entire thing and not just Tosh's half.

 

He doesn't make it as far as the other side of the rift manipulators, waylaid by Gwen with an expression on her face that makes the hairs on the back of his neck stand up although he's not entirely sure why.

 

“Engine 1, 2-04, and 2-19 were dead when I just cycled through the cameras. I just, can you come make sure it wasn't something I did while I work through the rest?” He falters only for a second before reminding himself that Jack's literally got more experience raising children than everyone else in the Hub combined and follows Gwen to her desk, glad she's already rolled her ugly maroon office chair around for him. He straddles the creaking thing and yanks the keyboard over towards him, hijacking the controls long enough to log himself in as duel control and steal one of the big screens. He queues the cameras up in batches of four, flipping through them and frowning as more screens stay black.

 

“Shit. I think they've been spotted. Keep going forward.” His ear piece clicks as he switches it to open. “Jack, Tosh, I think we've been made. Nine cameras on the first five levels have been shut down, all branching off a shared stairwell and the camera from the first Engine room is gone as well.”

 

“Shit.” Jack voice is low and pissed over the line. “I'm on my way down. Raise Chy and Owen, put them on alert.”

 

“I've already informed Owen, Cheyenne took her contacts out five minutes ago.” Tosh's voice is tight, wheels on her chair whirring as she whips herself around the monitoring station between keyboards.

 

“Of course she did.” Jack comes out of his office, plopping Indiana in his playpen with a bottle and crosses to Ianto's spot at Gwen's station. “Go help Tosh map out what's around this stairwell, check it against the list of bodies checked, see if you can figure out who we're chasing down. And tell Owen to stay where he is. I don't want him wandering around the ship right now until his partner's back online.” He's half in Ianto's seat before Ianto is all the way off the chair, twisted towards Gwen. “When did you notice the first camera go down?”

 

Nine minutes later Tosh raps her knuckles against his bicep, shoving a manifest covered in strike-throughs, highlighter streaks, and asterisks under his nose, flicking the pages until they rustle.

 

“Neither of them has been able to scan the ship’s doctor yet. They're supposed to fake ill and get into the medical center tonight to scan and guess what's on deck three right there by the stairwell?” She doesn't really need to flip the page to show Ianto the below decks schematics with the small hospital room sitting right on the stairs. On screen Chy is calming down, taking deep shuddering breaths behind her cupped hands and Ianto lets his eyes slide away from her, only to jerk them back up from the papers in his hand and start flicking through screens, cursing as the cameras on deck seven curving around to the foredeck all start going black in rapid succession.

 

“Jack! Jack, he's on their floor heading towards the suite!” Next to him Tosh is flying through the sub-audio setup, patching fast and dirty into Owen's line and Ianto's busy trying to jump ahead of whatever the smuggler is using to knock the cameras out of service and reorient the cameras before they can be taken offline. On the far screen the syncing glyph begins to flash as Cheyenne slips her contacts back in and for one moment Ianto gets the camera to spin fast enough to get a glimpse of the man shaped thing in a white doctor's jacket with it's bulbous milky white eyes and elongated face before he sees the alien lift a small black box in its fingers and the feed goes dead in real time.

 

“Owen it's Leviski, he's outside your suite and we can't raise Cheyenne.” The medic swings off his lounge chair up on the top deck in one quick movement at Jack's terse words as soon as the link settles, leaving an older gentlemen behind in the middle of a sentence. Gwen's pacing behind them, cell phone pressed to her ear as she dials the room and Cheyenne hesitates for a moment, veering towards the phone before something at the door makes her turn and cross the floor fast enough that she stumbles in her hurry.

 

“Shit.” The contact screen is still black, the sync glyph flashing rapidly and Ianto smacks the desktop in gut clenching fear and frustration as she wraps her hands around the door knob, yanking the door open too fast. “Shit!” Ianto can't see her face from this angle but he can see the frozen terror in the stiff line of her back and the foot she's almost lifted to break away backwards that seems unable to bolt in any direction as she looks up at the monster looking down at her.

 

“Run. Just run. Fucking run, Cheyenne!” The sync glyph disappears, screen going from perfect blackness to an exact copy of the monster mask face grinning down at her and a high choked noise dies in the woman's throat as she grabs the heavy door with both hands and slams as hard as she can, breaking off across the room towards the bedroom. The door crashes back into the wall, straight armed open and from the corner of his eye Ianto can just barely see Gwen heading back to Jack office at a run, carrying Indiana away from the screens full of a monster stalking his mother. One of the lamps is ripped out of the wall, light flickering as the cord is snapped and the entire thing is hurled towards the fleeing form. “Down!” She moves almost too slow, hitting the carpet on her side heavily and scrambling around the low coffee table on her knees as she shoves herself to her feet. Her little hands close around the wide polished back of one of the cherry wood chairs, hurling herself around as hard as she can. The edge of the chair connects and the alien reels back, smug grin sliding off its face leaving that toothy mouth turned down into a frightening snarl. It staggers backwards and Cheyenne throws herself past the alien away from the door and towards the bedroom where her gun is. “Owen, I need you in that room now!” There's nothing in her expression that says she can hear Jack urging Owen on and Ianto leans over Tosh, stealing her mouse long enough to drop his own ear piece into the sub-audio wave. It's seconds that he looks away, five is being generous, but it's still all managed to go to hell by the time Ianto looks back. The smuggler has his short, stubby little paws snarled in the fall of her hair, using her own momentum to fling Cheyenne halfway across the room. She hits the table, going over it in a heap and the alien is on her before she can do more than flop to her stomach and try to scramble away. She flops and rolls, kicking viciously and screaming in a way that makes Ianto's guts turn to broken glass because he has no idea how to save her from the laughing thing yanking her hard across the carpet by her hair.

 

“Fight him.” His voice is low, a snarl because Ianto thinks anything less might dissolve into tears. “Don't panic, goddamnit, Owen's thirty seconds out baby, just fight him!”

 

She does. It isn't enough. By the time Owen comes through the door, gun in hand aimed by Jack's instructions before he even has his foot on the door, Leviski has Cheyenne forced up onto her toes, one hand sunk deeply in her curls and the other wrapped around the slim line of her neck, fingers tight enough that Ianto's own knuckles go white with impotent rage as he watches the skin on her throat dimple and bruise.

 

“Drop the girl.” Owen never hesitates, just whips the barrel of the Berettaup and holds it steady between the other man's eyes.

 

“Drop the gun.” It's not the voice he was expecting. The alien's words are low, melodious and soothing. Ianto forces himself to take deep breaths and keep his voice soft and steady.

 

“You're okay baby. Just stay calm and don't fight him. Owen's armed and he's not going to hurt you because the second he does Owen will kill him and he knows it. You're his shield and he _needs_ you so just relax as much as you can and be ready to move when Owen tells you.”

 

“Right.” Owen's hands are steady as he keeps the barrel of his weapon tracking on the ridged sliver of head poking out around Cheyenne's. “Now that we've both made demands no one is agreeing to, why don't you give me a reason to shoot you in the head? I've yet to meet the alien that's faster than a bloody bullet.”

 

“Because you won't bet your partner's life that I'm not the first.” The smuggler is too smooth, half of it's smirk extending almost to the highest slope of its jaw. “Besides, I paid good money for a little bird to tell me that Harkness will ransom this one.” It shakes her, hard enough that she fumbles her footing and hangs for one breath stealing moment in a fatal grip that never slackens, tightening instead and pulling her higher, feet leaving the ground as she's hauled with inhuman strength until her head blocks the alien's completely. Her fingers scrabble off skin that her long nails should be cutting into and Tosh reaches over, twisting her fingers with Ianto's and squeezing sharply until he gasps in discomfort, forced to breathe without her.

 

“Well the only thing her corpse gets you is a bullet in your face. Put the girl on her feet now or I'll take my fucking chances.”

 

“Jack won't like that.” Ianto desperately wants to capture this smug cunt alive now, just so he can hurt him very badly. Her eyes are starting to flutter and for one frighteningly blank moment Ianto doesn't know where he is and then Tosh gives him another of those bone grinding hand squeezes.

 

“Cheyenne, you're okay. I'm here, okay? You're gonna be fine.” He doesn't know if she can hear him, but her attack on the arms holding her is fading.

 

“Jack's not here.” Owen chambers a bullet, the noise loud in the mics and slowly Cheyenne is lowered until the balls of her feet press into the carpet. She seems to stumble, gagging as she gasps for air and Ianto slumps down into his chair in relief.

 

“Next time, I take my chances that I can leave more bodies than you have bullets, understand me Torchwood?” It looks at Owen with flat perfectly opaque eyes that manage to convey it's rage quite clearly. “Now, I'm assuming you were smart enough to wire your own base as thoroughly as you did everywhere else. Can my good friend Jack see me? I want to talk to him. There's a phone over there on the desk, pick it up and give him a call. These rooms all have conference call capabilities, let's get in touch with him.”

 

“I want a connection to that room now.” Toshiko is already on it before Jack can bark out his instructions, fingers flying across the keyboards as she coaxes Mainframe to dial into the ship phones without hijacking all of them. “Get dialed in so Owen doesn't have to look away from them for a second. Ianto?”

 

“You're doing great cariad. Keep your feet under you, keep it together, and hold very still because Owen is a hell of a shot and as soon as he gets his chance you will wearing that bastards blood but don't tell him I said that.” He holds up a finger to let Jack know that he's hearing the other man, keeping up the soothing patter that's all he can do for her when his girl is halfway between death and the coast of Africa. He queues up the live satellite imaging, locking it in on Owen's phone and watching the globe on screen swivel around so that the eastern edge of the Atlantic is filling the monitor, zooming in until the ship is a flashing dot in the center. He's typing hard enough to make the keys rattle, sending out pings for nearby vessels. “Jack, I've got an American air craft carrier within hailing distance. Am I hailing a rescue?” He wants to, has the codes already queued up and his fingers are itching to send the encoded S.O.S to every incoming channel within a hundred miles of the Silver Cloud.

 

“Yes. Send a sensitive encryption to their Captain and let them know Torchwood has Agents in peril within fifty knots of their position and one of our operatives is an American citizen. If they come back with high enough security clearance let them know she's SHIELD affiliated, but get them in on this before this becomes uncontainable.” Jack has his hands sunk in his hair, scrubbing briskly over his face. “Tosh, are we open?

 

“Control is synced to your tablet Jack, your headset is in, but as many things as it's synced too don't expect it to hold out much past the six hour mark.”

 

“If we're still at this in six hours we'll have much bigger problems than burning out the coms with too many linked apps.” Jack takes out his hand held, taking remote access of the station Tosh is at, forcing her to wheel one down to connect the call. The tablet taps against his thigh, eyes cutting between the Owen cam on the largest screen, the room cams filling three other monitors with quad views from various angles and Chy's point of view on the monitor directly to Ianto's left as they wait for the connection to click on the ship side. The phone rings and Cheyenne turns her eyes towards it, even as Owen slides sideways, free hand stretched out to the side.

 

“No funny business now, this is just Jack calling exactly the way you asked.” They watch as Owen thumb on the speakerphone from three different angles.

 

“Leviski, didn't I tell you to stay the hell off my planet? Because I distinctly remember telling you to take your contraband to a different time zone.” Jack's voice echoes from the half second delay in traveling there and back through Chy and Owen's ears before he swaps the incoming sound to earpieces only.

 

“Yes, well a discerning business man like myself is hardly going to just give up on such a little gold mine! Twenty-first century Earth is a frontier just looking for a couple enterprising souls to take advantage. Really, I'm doing you a favor Jack. Better me than slavers.” The alien grins, twisting it's face further from human as it does.

 

“Or you could all just stay off my planet like I told you to.” Ianto spares a moment between relaying Jack's authorization codes to some stranger on an American ship two thousand miles away to look over at the man, rocking back and forth on his heels, voice perfectly calm even as the immortal man keeps throwing increasingly desperate looks at Cheyenne's image on the screen.

 

“You're so _unwelcoming_ Jack. I'm not coming in with you Harkness. I'll slaughter every man and woman on board this ship first.”

 

“And if you do that then there's no reason not to have the aircraft carrier fifty knots from you launch a long distance missile in your direction and turn you into confetti on the water. The more bodies you leave scattered around, the less likely I am to want to work with you Leviski. You want to start by telling me what your cargo is?” A chat box pops up on Ianto's screen, Jack's instructions outlining clearly how he wants backup sent in. It's the kind of off the cuff plan Jack uses to save them all the time and Ianto grits his teeth and begins transmitting; trusting that it can work with someone other than Jack at the helm.

 

“Nothing, not even a weapon this time Jack! It's a medical device, I'm practically a philanthropist in this case. And because I'm so nice and since your little friend here has such a small fragile neck, I think you should let me go. I think that I'm going to take one of these little boats, and my cargo, and the girl for insurance and we're going to wait right here for my buyer while the ship sails away with your boy here. Deal goes off well, I'll leave her behind when I go.”

 

“You think I'm stupid, and that hurts my feelings after all the years we've known each other. Call your buyer and tell them they have an hour to pick up you and your cargo, since that's how long it will take the nearest aircraft carrier to get there. After that it's in the hands of the Americans and you know what they're like. Vivisect first, ask what that organ does second. I've already contacted them and they're on their way in. Leave my team unharmed and you have an hour to find your way off that boat. Hurt either one of them and all deals are off. Make your calls.” Jack watches the room shift as Owen side steps closer to the phone.

 

“You're not even going to check on your hostage?”

 

“I can see her. She's fine, aren't you Dr. Morgan?” For a moment Jack's composure threatens to waiver as Cheyenne lifts her hand, wobbling it back in forth in a so-so gesture for the cameras. Ianto laughs under his breath, a wet kind of sound and at Jack's silent gesture Tosh cuts the connection. “Ianto, give me your station and go check on Indy and Gwen.”

 

Poor Gwen who seems to end up the default baby sitter every time the big tech is rolled out. Ianto thinks he must owe her jewelry or a vacation for all the work they only manage to get done because she's got an arm full of his offspring. He slides out of his chair, stopping short as Jack reaches out, tangling their fingers together and squeezing.

 

“She'll be fine. Check on Indy and then get UNIT on the line. Tell them we need transport from Cardiff to Casablanca and that I want one of the helicopters. The 565 Dauphine if it's not in active use, the Sea King HR-5 if it's gone. If they give you any flack, hang up on them and dial the RAF, same request. I want a chopper and a co-pilot sitting on the tarmac forty minutes from now and then figure out what we're doing with Indiana because we fly out in an hour and I need backup.”

 

“You can't bring Tosh?”

 

“Convicted felon on work release. I can't leave the country.” Tosh says it so matter of factly that for a moment Ianto wonders how on Earth he could have forgotten before realizing he never knew.

 

“You're a _what_?”

 

“A traitor to the crown technically. It's why I'm not cleared for high caliber weapons, or on that boat right now instead of Owen.”

 

“You _lie_.” She gives him a half grin.

 

“For the next seven months, and then I'm free. Indy's fine with us. Have Gwen call Rhys in, he can backup the babysitting.”

 

“Thank you Tosh.” Because Ianto had no idea what he was going to say to Rhiannon in less than ten minutes to explain why he's dumping her nephew on her again, this time to leave the continent for ten or so hours. Ianto takes the stairs at a run, skidding into Jack's office to find he's been rendered unnecessary. Gwen is sprawled out on the couch with her headset in and Jack's laptop swiveled around next to her on the rolling drink cart, Indiana curled on her chest with his thumb in his mouth as he sucks in short hitching gasps of air.

 

“Don't say a word because he doesn't know that's you. Just back away slowly. I've had a live feed in my ear the entire time and know what's going on. I've already texted Rhys and we'll be glad to keep him for the night. Leave your key and we'll take him home to yours, feed the dogs, and help ourselves to the green room.” He heads for the conference room and thinks longingly of skipping the chain of command and avoiding UNIT altogether before taking a deep breath and dialing. Because someone somewhere knows how very little time he has to bicker, Rebecca from distribution and allocation picks up the phone and is willing to take his word at it that Jack can fly the Dauphine.

 

“Helicopter's on its way from UNIT and will be fueled and waiting at the airport landing pad in fifteen minutes. Usual kit?” Ianto comes down the stairs at a run, bringing up his checklist for the kind of gear Jack prefers for an emergency extraction.

 

“Plus my wetsuit and bolt gun.” Ianto nods, eyes focused on the bank of monitors and where the alien has barricaded himself and Cheyenne out onto the ocean side balcony of her room. “He's willing to take the easy way right now and leave if his buyer will show early, but Leviski is the best smuggler in this time zone for a reason. He knows the Americans won't open fire on a cruise liner full of rich civilians, and he knows a hostage is better than fighting his way out.” It's cold comfort, but better than none at all and Ianto lets it carry him through double checking the kit, syncing his own tablet into the mix, and prepping one last bottle that he doesn't get to give because Indiana is already sound asleep.

 

***

 

Ianto forces himself to doze on the helicopter, heavy ear protectors muffling a literally deafening roar down to a still jarring roar that makes miserable background noise to sleep to. He's fastened in to one of the rows of seats behind the cockpit, head pillowed on Jack's coat, listening to the constant traffic of updates between the Hub through the one way sets when it happens.

 

“Don't make a stupid decision.” It's the first thing Cheyenne's said since those short stubby fingers closed tight around her throat and her voice, hoarse from being choked, startles Ianto into full wakefulness. “We can all still walk away from this.”

 

“He set me up. That fucking bastard set me up.” There's a tremble to the smuggler's voice, tinny after being rerouted so many times, but still obvious. Ianto forces himself to unclench his fists and yank his tablet out of the side pocket of his bag, cursing as he scrambles to pull up the video feed. He curses the camera angles, Cheyenne angled out to sea and unable to turn her head away from the waves, Owen unable to see anything more substantial than the spill of her hair around the curve of the ship, and not a single camera placed out on the balcony to swap to. “Well, that's unlucky for you because I'm not surrendering. I'm not just going to hand myself over to you projectile wielding, ground-bound primitives to be locked in some cage. I've done this long enough to know what you curious little monsters do in the name of knowledge when you think nobody's looking. Not _this_ little spaceman. Call off the aircraft carrier. Now.”

 

“I _can't_. Even if I knew what ship to call and what codes to use, here on Earth we don't let hostages under duress send the cavalry home. Particularly since you've threatened to kill as many people as possible. Just _leave_.”

 

“You stupid little primitive! You think I'm here with tech as cheap and useless as a singularity scalpel for fun? It's trash; worthless compared to the fucking _score_ I was promised. A score I've already _sold_ to a very interested, very dangerous buyer who won't think twice about taking a standard year to make me regret stepping off this loathsome little mud ball of yours without it. The scalpel was just to pass the time, make a little cash and flip it for something useful and easy to move, but Jack has gotten in the way again. My friend Jack,” The alien says something strange and most probably uncomplimentary that Mainframe doesn't, or can't, translate. “Who I'm starting to think has set me up, has just ruined the biggest deal since the Time Wars ended.”

 

“If Jack had set you up he would have done it at home where he could catch you with far less inconvenience.”

 

“Shut up!” He shakes her, he has to since the entire image wobbles alarmingly.

 

“If I'm dying today, I'm not doing it quietly. We didn't set you up, although that man on the other side of the glass? I think he'll really enjoy being elbows deep in your corpse...”

 

The next thirty seconds are a jumble. The image moves, safety railing coming into and then out of view entirely too quickly. For a moment the sea fills the screen at the wrong angle, rushing white wake dominating his view and his ears are ringing with the sharp sound of Cheyenne's scream and the echoing cacophony of broken glass and gunfire.

 

“Clear!” Owen's voice has the faintest hint of a tremble. “Whoever's listening, we're clear, okay? Target is down and restrained, presumed dead barring a physical examination, and we're fine.” Owen's face fills the screen as it pans away from the ocean. There powdered glass in his hair, little nicks and cuts dotted along his face and hand as he stares at Ianto through Cheyenne. “We're _fine_. No need for a rescue, although I wouldn't mind it if someone has an idea about how to get this corpse off my fucking deck.”

 

“We're three and a half hours from you Owen, I'll deal with it when we get there.” Jack's not even trying to hide the way his voice is shaking. “You've got a Nimitz class aircraft carrier on a course to intercept and contain. Do you need help, or are we good to just have them hold the ship at sea until we land?”

 

“Don't you dare let those assholes board and start stomping around in here. We'll be waiting, so hurry up!”

 


	7. Chapter 7

At least one thing has gone right this week.

 

Cheyenne lets herself lay back into the soft cushions mounded on the lounge chair she's currently stretched across, basking in the sun and a job well accomplished. She's been up since five, in conferences since six and as of an hour and a half ago, the personal half of her agenda has been met and the merger she's been providing the friendly face for on and off for the past six months has gone through. If they could just catch the alien running around the ship like it owns the place, she'd be tempted to call this the most efficient working vacation she's taken in years. The sun is huge and hot off the top of the African coast and there's a generous pour of pineapple vodka in the coconut water she's sipping.

 

Owen's sprawled across his own chair next to her, apparently determined to go back to Cardiff just as dark as she is. Already little streaks of ash blonde are trying to peek out at the crown of his head and the pale stone grey swim trunks just make his skin look darker.

 

_::go back 2 room. get 2 mirror::_

 

Cheyenne lets her eyes take in the message, flicking to Owen who doesn't seem to have one by the way he's still deep in a conversation with the man Myrna apparently sold his horse to the same day she kicked him out. She takes his hand in hers, tapping two of her fingers twice against his palm to let him know she's heading back to base before easing off the lounge chair and making her way back to the front of the ship to the sky deck and their cabin.

 

Her heels click along the polished wood as Cheyenne lets her fingers trail along the rails, looking out at the wake. She hasn't been on a cruise in years and she's trying not to feel guilty about enjoying the sun and sea air while she works, reminding herself that she and Owen have spent the last four days under constant scrutiny except for when they were creeping around the ship all hours of the night, planting as many disruptors as they could charge with their body heat. She lets herself into the spacious sitting room and takes a minute to skim her eyes over the data feed from the cameras. The cam in Engine room one is out and she makes a note to tell someone before crossing the room to the mirror on the far wall. She stands in front of it, lifting her eyes up to the ceiling as she adjusts the top of her bikini before looking down at her reflection.

 

"Ship two to base, clear for incoming."

 

_::jack is laughing @ u::_

 

"Jack is a dick.” She grins at the mirror, winking at him because she knows he's nearby. “Is this a check in, or are you all just missing my dulcet tones?"

 

_::stand by for sub-audio transmissions::_

 

"...Ere she is. You see mummy? Say hi to mummy." It's weird, hearing Ianto's voice without actually hearing it.

 

"Hi baby!" She waves at her reflection and tries not to tear up as Indiana's enthusiastic squeal comes over the coms, a babble of 'mamama' that makes her chest feel too tight as she drags in a deep shuddering breath and forces it out, fluffing her bangs with the puff of air just to hear Indiana laugh. "My big boy! Are you being good for Daddy and Jack?"

 

She stands there, staring in a mirror and trying not to cry as her son watches her reflection through her own eyes and coos at her for ten minutes until Jack's voice comes across the line, coaxing Indiana to say goodbye and then apparently removing him quickly from the com area as he begins to shriek.

 

"Jesus. I can't...I have to go. I have to go offline." Tosh and Ianto are talking over each other in their haste to get her to leave the contacts in. "Ship two is non-com." She yanks the case for the contacts out, shuddering as Ianto's voice goes dead suddenly when she flicks one out of her eye, dropping it in the solution and following it with the other as quickly as she can. Her hair falls into her face as she lets herself sag to the floor, hands clasped over her mouth as she shakes and sobs, taken by helpless surprise with how very much she misses her son.

 

She's still sprawled on the floor, scrubbing the heel of her hand as close to her eyes as she can without smearing her eyeliner beyond all repair when there's brisk rapping against the door.

 

“One moment!” Cheyenne pushes herself to her feet, prying her sore puffy lids open wide enough to slip her contacts in and blinking hard and fast as the glyph she's come to associate with 'sync in process' begins to flash in the bottom corner of her vision. The rapping at the door comes again, fast and hard enough to sound official and she sighs deeply in annoyance that there's no time to grab so much as a lightly tinted pair of shades before stalking across the floor. “I swear to God Owen, if you forgot your fucking key and you're banging on the door like that, I'm going to slam it in your face!” The phone rings, sudden and shrill.

 

“Ship's Doctor, open the door please.” There's a gut clenching spike of fear that shoots through Cheyenne and she's convinced that while she was curled up behind the desk crying and off-line Owen has run into their smuggler and come out the worse for it with no one but her that knows what happened. Her fingers slip off the doorknob in her haste and Cheyenne slings the door open wide as her cellphone across the room begins to chirp out her Torchwood ringtone to find herself looking up into the overly large pair of bulging milky white eyes settled into the face of her target.

 

“Fuck.”

 

“Oh good, right room.” There's more disruption than just the eyes. The entire face she's looking at is too long, features subtly elongated and widened until the not-man looming over her with a smirk on its frightening almost concave face looks more like a human mask being stretched than any kind of actual human being. For one breath stealing moment she's frozen, unable to wrap her mind around the nightmarish parody baring too many teeth as it smiles down at her before the syncing glyph disappears.

 

“Fucking run Cheyenne!” Jack's voice jars her free, sub-audio transmission delivering his shout with teeth rattling force directly to her brain. She swallows down the shriek building behind her eyes and whips the door still in her hand closed as hard as she can, spinning on her heels as the smuggler uses both hands to keep the hardwood from smashing into its face and breaking for the bedroom where her gun is resting just inside the drawer closest to the living area and the bedroom exit will dump her out into the halls of the cruise liner.

 

Behind her the suite door slams against the wall with a sharp crack and she's seconds from touching the knob to the closed bedroom door when Jack screams for her to dive. She throws herself towards the sitting area and yelps short and sharp as something heavy goes sailing past her head, a white hot line of fire licking across her bare back and side as the plug for the lamp whips against her; a burning brand that screams move faster or die. Her knees burn, scraped raw against the carpet and her ears are echoing with her own too fast heartbeat as Cheyenne scrambles across the floor and onto her feet. The hard cherry wood chairs are heavy as she wraps her small hands around the back, heaving it up and whipping around with chair in hand, smashing it against the caricature laughing at her as it reaches out for her. The alien stumbles backwards with a snarl, unbalanced and reeling between where she stands and either door and Cheyenne hurls herself past it on the left in one last frantic bid for the bedroom and her gun.

 

The room whirls around her as short thick fingers tangle in her hair and yank the woman abruptly off her feet, whipping her through the air and to the floor violently. She screams then, can't stop herself from crying out for help any more than she can keep herself from rolling and kicking out at the alien yanking her closer by its vicious grip on her hair. Jack's not yelling in her head anymore but Ianto is speaking to her, voice low and steady as he tells her to keep screaming and kicking.

 

“Fight him! Don't panic, goddammit, Owen's thirty seconds out baby, just fucking fight him!”

 

She does. For what feels like forever she tries to break free of the grip dragging her backwards, but by the time Owen kicks the door open, Beretta in hand, she's all but dangling from the smuggler's grip with the hand not using her hair to hold her up onto her toes wrapped frighteningly tight around her throat.

 

“Drop the girl.”

 

“Drop the gun.” Every inch of Cheyenne is icy cold, heart pounding hard enough that she can feel the blood throbbing through every single one of her bruises and she forces herself to take deep breaths and focus on the sound of Ianto's voice telling her to be ready to move whenever he tells her to.

 

“Right, now that we've both made demands no one is agreeing to, why don't you give me a reason not to shoot you in the head. I've yet to meet the alien that's faster than a bloody bullet.”

 

“Because you won't bet your partner's life that I'm not the first. Besides, I paid good money for a little bird to tell me that Harkness will ransom this one.” Leviski yanks her hair, shaking her until she stumbles and for one drawn out heart beat the world narrows to a tunnel as the alien tightens its grip to keep her upright and cuts off her gasp. She flails, fumbling to get back onto the balls of her feet and tries to dig her nails into skin that's oddly tough and strangely textured, scrambling to pry the fingers away from the crushing grip on her throat as she's lifted completely off her feet.

 

“Well the only thing her corpse gets you is a bullet in your face. Put the girl on her feet now or I'll take my fucking chances.”

 

“Jack won't like that.” The corners of Cheyenne's vision are starting to go black and gray, sparks and flashes of light dancing across her field of sight.

 

“Jack isn't here.” Ianto's voice doesn't fade out so much as begin to lose coherency, but the sound of Owen cocking his weapon is sharp and clear.

 

The floor has never felt so good under her feet as she's lowered onto the balls of her feet and no further, stumbling as she tries to force her legs to keep her upright. She's gagging, choking on the thin fast gulps of air she's trying to drag in before it can be taken away again.

 

“Next time I take my chances that I can leave more bodies than you have bullets, understand me Torchwood? Now, I'm assuming you were smart enough to wire your own base as thoroughly as you did everywhere else. Can my good friend Jack see me? I want to talk to him. There's a phone over there on the desk, pick it up and give him a call. These rooms all have conference call capabilities, let's get in touch with him.”

 

“I'm sure he's already trying to patch through. I'm also sure I'm not taking this gun off you long enough to dial the phone. The three of us are going to wait right here for Jack to secure the line and call _us_.”

 

It takes an eternity for the phone in the room to ring. Twice her legs have begun to shake, fear and adrenaline working against her, and twice she's remembered the cold trembling black edged awfulness of being unable to breathe and forced her legs to hold her uncomfortably high on the balls of her feet. The phone, when it does ring, startles the thing behind her. Fingers like hard rubber dig harder into the already bruised column of her throat and she desperately wants to cry except she knows the inhuman creature behind her would just dangle her in front of Owen as she choked.

 

“Leviski, didn't I tell you to stay the hell off my planet? Because I distinctly remember telling you to take your contraband to a different time zone.” Jack's words are sharp and cold, his 'wrathful hero' tone loud through the speakers.

 

“Yes, well a discerning business man like myself is hardly going to just give up on such a little gold mine! Twenty-first century Earth is a frontier just looking for a couple enterprising souls to take advantage. Really, I'm doing you a favor Jack. Better me than slavers.”

 

They quip and bitch and snipe at each other and the alien behind her stands a little tenser and flexes its grip a little harder with every threat Jack makes. “You're not even going to check on your hostage?” Its breath stinks like cilantro and rancid nuts as it loosens its grip around her neck minutely but yanks harder on her hair to try and cover as much of its head and torso behind her much smaller frame as it can.

 

“I can see her. She's fine, aren't you Dr. Morgan?” She's not fine. She's not fucking fine and Jack is getting a punch in the throat if she lives long enough for putting her in the position where she has to put on her brave face, because Hell will freeze before she shows the thing behind her how much it's scaring her right now. Speaking is out of the question so she lifts her hand, wobbles it from side to side like it's no big deal and forces herself to keep that bored expression on her face when the line goes dead instead of screaming for Jack to come back.

 

“You heard him. Jack's willing to let you walk out of here if you can. You'd be an idiot not to take it.”

 

“You'd be an idiot to keep trying to creep closer. Come with me little one, let's take in some fresh air, shall we?” The balcony overlooking the side of the ship is smaller than the one in the front of the room but big enough for structural details of the ship to queer most angles Owen could shoot from. Cheyenne wraps her hands around the thick forearm crushing her against the strangely shaped body she's being used to shield, bracing herself to hang from the limb if she stumbles as it drags her backwards and out onto the smooth wooden floor. “Shut the door. Don't lean, don't wiggle, just stick your arm out and slide the door shut or I'll pull your ugly little round head off.” Her arms almost aren't long enough to glide the plate glass back along its track and her nails scrabble off the handle twice before the pitch of the ship angles the bow up just enough for gravity to help her along.

 

The bend of the hull makes a shallow little alcove where the railing meets and the alien presses back into the fiberglass siding. Slowly she's lowered until her feet rest flat on the deck. The muscles in her calves cramp, violently trying to lock themselves into knots.

 

“Don't move, don't talk, don't scream. Put your hands on the railing, face out to sea and stay there or you go over and I take my chances.” It shoves her, knocking her into the railing and she grabs for it desperately, hobbled by cramps and frantic not to fall. It angles her, twisting her torso to block even more of Owen's already limited sight line and pulls his hands off her. For one sweet moment, less than a second, she's free and then something small, flat, and cold is pressed against her skull. “I can turn the brains in your thin little skull into paste without moving a hair on your head. Don't act cute.”

 

***

 

He's doing something and Cheyenne has no idea what. She's been staring out to sea long enough that she's lost track while the smuggler hisses and snarls incomprehensible strings of sound behind her. She doesn't have the faintest idea what he's doing, how he's calling anyone, but it sounds like things aren't going well and there's a smudge of grey on her left that wasn't there five minutes ago. She was willing to write it off as a mirage, but she's convinced now that it can see it too. That it's the ship Jack threatened, which means it's been more than an hour now and it's starting to look like the smuggler has been abandoned.

 

It's cornered and panicking, backing up against the rail with the whitewash of the wake churning up the ocean five stories below. She freezes, fingers locked around the rail as it grabs her throat again and presses itself back against her.

 

“Don't make a stupid decision. We can all still walk away from this.” It's a horse whisper that creaks out of her mouth.

 

“He set me up. That fucking bastard set me up.” There's a cold kind of serenity under the bitterness. “Well, that's unlucky for you because I'm not surrendering. I'm not just going to hand myself over to you projectile wielding, ground-bound primitives to be locked in some cage.” The hand holding her by the throat is shaking and she can only hope the tremors in the one holding the small silver box pointed at her head doesn't set it off somehow. “I've done this long enough to know what you curious little monsters do in the name of knowledge when you think nobody's looking. Not _this_ little spaceman. Call off the aircraft carrier. Now.”

 

“I _can't_. Even if I knew what ship to call and what codes to use, here on Earth we don't let hostages under duress send the cavalry home. Particularly since you've threatened to kill as many people as possible. Just _leave_.”

 

“You stupid little primitive! You think I'm here with tech as cheap and useless as a singularity scalpel for fun?” It raps the side of her skull with the silver box and she whines deep in her throat. “It's trash; worthless compared to the fucking _score_ I was promised. A score I've already _sold_ to a very interested, very dangerous buyer who won't think twice about taking a standard year to make me regret stepping off this loathsome little mud ball of yours without it. The scalpel was just to pass the time, make a little cash and flip it for something useful and easy to move, but Jack has gotten in the way again. My friend Jack.” The alien says something strange and most probably uncomplimentary in a language that Mainframe doesn't, or can't, translate. “Who I'm starting to think has set me up, has just ruined the biggest deal since the Time Wars ended.”

 

“If Jack had set you up he would have done it at home where he could catch you with far less inconvenience.” It's going to kill her. That's a massive ship approaching on an intercept course and whatever extraction plans the smuggler Leviski had seem to have crumbled in on him simultaneously. There's no way it's getting out of this alive and Cheyenne knows that means she's lost her value. She's going to die, and she's not going to be graceful about it.

 

“Shut up!” It shakes her, whips her back and forth fast enough that she catches the corner of her lip with her eye teeth. Blood spills down the corner of her mouth, as much in as out.

 

“If I'm dying today, I'm not doing it quietly. We didn't set you up, although that man on the other side of the glass? I think he'll really enjoy being elbows deep in your corpse...” It's exactly the wrong thing to say. It roars in her ear, a high thrumming sound that makes Cheyenne want to vomit before it turns and shoves her as hard as it can towards the railings. She's been braced for it, terrified of this exact outcome from the moment it had her stand at the edge of the railing and she locks her arms, lets her trembling legs give out and falls half across the railing, arms locked around it and staring blankly at the steep drop into the churning waters below. Something shatters, and there's glass everywhere, gun fire overhead and that's Owen's voice shouting over her screaming. There's the sound of more glass falling out of the door frame, fast footsteps on the deck and then Owen's got her by the shoulders, yanking Aher back from the railing and flopping her down across a deck chair with it's glass studded cushions thrown down onto the ground. The doctor has glittering specks of glass in his hair, little dots and hair thin trails of blood trailing the edge of his jaw and back of his hand as he tilts her face up.

 

“We're fine.” He says something else, Cheyenne can see his lips moving, but mostly all she's hearing is the too loud tidal pulse of her own blood rushing in her ears. She stares at him blankly as he speaks, pauses, speaks, pauses and snaps his fingers at her.

 

“Fine, I'm fine.” It's probably the right answer for when someone's been snapping their fingers in your face which is what you do for shock.

 

“The hell you are.” At least she's hearing something other than her own pulse again. “I didn't even ask if you were fine, I asked if you wanted to sit on the couch or on the bed. Come on.”

 

“No! Don't stop looking at him!” There's a foot, flopped at an awkward angle that's been in the peripheral of Cheyenne's view and she hasn't looked up past it, but she also hasn't let it leave her sight once, focused to make sure it doesn't so much as twitch. Owen, however, hasn't taken his eyes off the likely corpse for more than half a second at a time, hasn't dropped his gun yet, and Cheyenne likes it that way.

 

“He's dead. Do yourself a favor and take my word for it instead of looking though, because that's even grosser than a normal head shot. Besides, I already cuffed the corpse. Come on, let's put you in the bed. If you're going to fall apart like this you can at least do it in the bed so I can use you as an excuse not to deal with the backup until Jack gets here.”

 

“You're such a dick Owen.” He half lifts her over the worst of the blown out glass, steering her around the wrecked furniture and in to the cool, perfectly untouched bed.

 

“There, you're feeling better already. Fake it anyway, okay?”

 

***

 

She's cross legged on the bed, the over large robe meant for Owen wrapped around her while she's filling out the storage and transportation papers for the tentatively identified 'singularity scalpel' that may or may not boil brains without damaging skulls when the door swings open hard enough to bounce off the wall. Ianto lets the bag on his shoulder slide off to the floor, crossing the floor at a speed between a walk and a run to shove half written reports and sealed evidence boxes across the king sized bed, clearing enough room for him to slide onto the bed next to her. His suit is wrinkled under her as Ianto tugs her into his lap, wrapping himself as tightly as he can around her and exhaling a long shuddering breath against her skin. Her head fits just right under his chin when she curls up small against him like this, arms slung around his neck and fingers twisting nervously in the ends of his hair while he traces the inward spiral of her tattoo under the double thick terry cloth.

 

“Never again Chy.” He doesn't say anything else, just presses his face further into her hair and squeezes her tighter.

 

“Hell no. My nerves can't take this, Jesus fucking Christ, I got taken hostage today.” Everything in her that's held her tattered shreds of coolness together gives way and she lets herself burrow her face into his jacket as she shakes.

 

“Yeah, but you were fantastic every minute of it. It's okay, the first time is always the worst. Come on, we've got a couple minutes, but we need to start taking the room apart. We're putting out a story about terrorist threats and a hostage situation, but we need to hustle you and Owen out on the helicopter with us when we go to make it work.” They don't move though, not until Jack comes through the door. Behind him men in Navy whites are carrying out a double thick body bag and he's looming over the bed in seconds, scooping her up out of Ianto's slackened grip and squeezing her once before setting her on her feet.

 

“Hey kiddo, let me see.” His hands are warm as Jack catches her chin, tipping her head up as far as her sore neck will stretch before she hisses through her teeth in discomfort. “Sorry. These are some seriously impressive bruises. Good thing high collars are in this spring.”

 

“No, they aren't.” He winces at the hoarse crack in her voice and she swallows, painfully and self-conscious, fingers fluttering up to rest on the blackening imprints on her neck. “I sound terrible.”

 

“Yes you do, but you looked like a Bond girl, swinging chairs in a white two piece. Come on, I think Owen's done getting his face and scalp checked for glass. Let's go home.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> done! See you in Late January/Early February when we go back to our regular episodes with 'Adam' as 'Faint of Heart'


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